I shot this last night. Galaxies really need to imaged in darker skies, away from light pollution where you can get unaffected images for better post-processing results. Discovered 1773 by Charles Messier. The famous Whirlpool galaxy Messier 51 (M51, NGC 5194) is one of the most conspicuous, and probably the most wellknown spiral galaxy in the sky. M51 was one of Charles Messier's original discoveries: He discovered it on October 13, 1773, when observing a comet, and described it as a "very faint nebula, without stars" which is difficult to see. Its companion, NGC 5195, was discovered on March 21, 1781 by his friend Pierre Mechain, so that it is mentioned in Messier's 1781 catalog: `It is double, each has a bright center, which are separated 4'35". The two "atmospheres" touch each other, the one is even fainter than the other.' In addition to the description, in his personal copy of the catalog, Messier has added a small drawing, or sketch of the two "nebulae," M51 and NGC 5195, one of the rare cases a detailed drawing by Charles Messier of one of his objects is preserved. NGC 5195 was assigned an own catalog number by William Herschel: H I.186. Occasionally, there is some confusion what is meant with the designation M51: The pair (justified by Messier's mention of both "nebulae") or the larger galaxy, NGC 5194. If the pair is meant, NGC 5194 is sometimes called "M51A", and NGC 5195 is then "M51B". M51 is the dominating member of a small group of galaxies, which also contains M63 and a number of fainter galaxies. As it is about 37 million light years distant and so conspicuous, it is actually a big and luminous galaxy. The value of M51's (and the whole group's) distance is still not very well known. Our value, of 37 Mly, is based on photometric methods and e.g. given by Kenneth Glyn Jones. Some authors give significantly lower values (less than 20 Mly), but a recent (2001) STScI Press Release gave 31 million light years. - seds.org Image Details: Imaging Scope: Astrotelescopes 80mm ED Refractor Imaging Camera: Nikon D7000 Guiding Scope: William Optics 66mm Petzval Refractor Guiding Camera: Meade DSI-C Mount: Celestron CGEM Exposures: 9 * 6 minute lights, 5 * 6 minute darks ISO 640 Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker Post-Processing in GIMP (contrast, saturation and unsharp mask) Noise Reduction in NeatImage

An image of the whirlpool galaxy. Taken with a Canon EOS 50D and a 200 mm (L) lens. No tracking was used. The camera was mounted on a fixed tripod. Approx. 500 Frames with 3 seconds exposure time were stacked using deep sky stacker. Post processing steps include color level adjustment to fix a massive violett tone in the stacked image, denoising, background level extraction and subtraction and finally a deconvolution was applied to reduce star trails. These steps were made with PixInsight. The resulting image was then fed into Photomatix for a HDR processing and the result was overlayed with the PixInsight result using GIMP. The last step was eliminating the star trails entirely using "darken only" with a slightly shifted layer and final color and level adjustments.