Colour M51

Of course it looks like art.
Vincent Van Gogh painted it in "Starry Night"

Not to be too pedantic, but it's unlikely Vincent painted M51, not because they were unaware of it or it hadn't been painted before, but simply because in a letter to his mate he refers to them as swirling clouds. He was an absolute stark raving lunatic at this point of his career.
The similarity is striking though.

Lord Rosse, the Irish astronomer had painted it 44 years earlier...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Parsons%2C_3rd_Earl_of_Rosse
Nice segue or what?

Vincent was inspired by the drawing of M51 made by Parsons.

A copy of the drawing was found amongst his papers.

Nebulae = Clouds (Latin).
His sanity has nothing to do with it.

The connection to Ross's drawing is BLINDINGLY obvious actually when you look at Starry Night:

www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/images/starrynight.jpg

Peter.

Kieran,

Well done thats a fine image. Nice detail, nice colour and good guiding. From the critical point of view, it looks to me as if the red channel is particularly noisy. I remember you mentioning you had to push the red on an earlier image. What filters do you use?

Anyway thats not to take away from a first class image. Well done! I remember looking at some of your earlier images which were excellent, but your latest batch are exceptional.

A more processed version



Dave filters are astronomik. Also twigged that I had the H alpha filter in the red position :oops:

Dave filters are astronomik. Also twigged that I had the H alpha filter in the red position :oops:

Doh!! That explains it. I should have guessed. HA images are inherently more noisy. Looks like a nice night tonight. Perhaps a night for capturing another red channel? You could turn this wonderful image into a real killer image.

Now that is a nice image !! looks almost 3D!!