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      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

      Open
      Telescope Live
      SPA-2-CCD

      Glorious M51