20 Jun 2025
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
M51
21 credit