M51 Whirlpool 4 March

Hi

Here is an attempt at M51 from 4 March.
www.flickr.com/photos/steve_beaney/4408713866/

It's the first I feel comfortable showing (I have some lesser shots from the last few months) I think this is showing me the way forward. The transparency was fairly poor that night and I could only see Polaris,gamma and beta in Ursa Minor.

Even with 17 frames (20 taken, 3 discarded) I'm really struggling to get any contrast despite having caught some detail in the spiral (some lcd screens almost hide the image of the galaxy)

Clear skies
Steve

www.flickr.com/photos/steve_beaney/4410987862/

this is a reprocessing of the deepSkyStacker result to pull as much contrast as I think I dare.

Steve,

I have to be honest rather than just do some 'back slapping' but there is something terribly wrong here. You should be able to expect a significantly better result than that even with one single 120 sub. With 17 subs you should be getting a rich detailed image. I know you are particularly expert at photoshop so I'd have to point the finger at the capture. However before we go there I have to ask, was a digital development algorithm used? A DDP algorithm usually produces a pretty good result without any user intervention. What about the individual subs? What do they look like. Care to e-mail me one and I could look at it.

It looks to me that you did everything right, 17 subs while not loads should be sufficient to produce a much better result. Clearly the guiding etc is working well. I know you mention the sky conditions were not great but I still thing a richer result should have come from all your hard work.