Wallpaper author:
Jared Greer
20 Jun 2025
Glorious M51
Messier 51 is one of the most popular targets in the night sky. It's very high surface brightness means you can extract details even in urban areas with a lot of light pollution. I combined the CMOS and CCD data together from SPA-2. There were about 958 frames in total with lots of different exposure lengths and slightly different FOVs. About 700-750 of those frames were combined into the final image.
Stacking/preprocessing: Astro Pixel Processor
Processing: Pixinsight
Post-processing: Photoshop
Dataset from which the image was processed
M51
21 credit
- Type of target............................................................................................................................Galaxy
- Camera............................................................................................................................FLI PL16803
- Target coordinates............................................................................................................................RA 202.4696 Dec 47.1953
- Hemisphere............................................................................................................................Northern
- Telescope location............................................................................................................................Spain
- Transient event............................................................................................................................No
- Observed on............................................................................................................................15 Feb 2020 - 31 Jan 2022
Filter | Avg Exp (s) | Total Exposure | Subframes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luminance | 189 | 6h40m | 127 |
| Green | 130 | 4h36m | 127 |
| Red | 135 | 4h44m | 126 |
| Blue | 130 | 4h34m | 126 |
| Halpha | 36 | 1h15m | 126 |