This image of M51 was taken under a clear, moonless sky with stars visible down to magnitude 5. I was using my 10 inch f/4.8 reflector, a Vixen Atlux mount, PHD autoguiding and an atik 383L Mono CCD camera.
I captured five minute sub-frames with matching dark frames and applied flat fields to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image.
The camera was set on x1 bin mode for the luminance using an IDAS filter with a total exposure time of 90 minutes. For the colour data the camera was set on x2 bin mode with exposure times of 35 minutes using a H-alpha filter, 25 minutes using an OIII filter and 15 minutes using a blue filter.
M51 (New data)
M51 (New and old data combined)
M51 (New and old data, plus data from two cameras, and Atik 383L MONO CAMERA AND AN aTIK 314L mono camera)
