Too close for comfort: M51 - 08/07/2024

 Hello!

Let's take a look at things not working out.. and not in an obvious way too!

On the night I imaged Saturn, I also tried imaging the Whirlpool Galaxy - one of if not THE favorite target of mine! It's not really a difficult target, be it to find or photograph.. I mean, I took a cool image of it years ago back when I was doing pretty much everything wrong!

But anyway, I was still waiting for my OnStep kit to arrive and was super curious about trying out the ZWO asi462mm camera, as this was my first time experiencing a dedicated astrocam and I couldn't use it for guiding until OnStep arrived anyway..

I checked, and the Whirlpool Galaxy fit in my FOV just about perfectly! 






It wasn't gonna be easy to locate with the telescope, and at that super narrow FOV of course I had to get a really dope polar alignment and had to pay attention so that it doesn't drift out of frame..

But I managed to do that! And, at the moment, everything seemed to have gone perfectly..


Shoutout to my awesome cat - Tihi :D




But unfortunately.. when I got around to editing the data.. it turned out odd.


At first I just thought that despite collecting about an hour of usable data my signal was just super weak for some reason, and I got super confused.. but then I realized that DeepSkyStacker only used a handful of frames for the stack! Instead of using the 120 or so subexposures, it would only use 7 at best, and even that was after tinkering around with it quite a bit..


Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I have not managed to stack more... I did try stacking in Siril as well but it couldn't stack it properly either..

Sometimes, things just go wrong in this hobby.. but it's fine. There were more nights after this one, and there will be many more still! I'll have countless more opportunities to image Whirlpool in the future :)



By the end, this was the image I was left with, I'm not sure how many frames stacked this is, but it's something between 3 and 7



There are more problems with it than just the stacking issue.. a camera with such tiny pixels is a terrible combination with a 6" telescope of such focal lenght (1200mm), which I didn't even realize at the time, but I was just experimenting waiting for new gear to arrive, and at least I had fun playing around :D








Also, as a bonus, here is a funny broken misaligned stack haha:



See you next time, when I try (and, spoiler alert, succeed!!) at imaging the International Space Station fly in front of a nebula!



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