Not surprisingly, this galaxy pair has been high on my list of imaging targets. Multiple attempts to image this object in 2018 ended in frustration: failed autoguiding one time, dewed up telescope objective another and clouds a third time! Each attempt preceded by a 2 hr drive and followed by one as well—crestfallen and sleep deprived! In hindsight, it was fortuitous I was forced to wait a year before trying again—the intervening months giving me an opportunity to climb up the steep imaging + processing learning curve some more, resulting in a better image than what I would’ve managed back in 2018.

I managed to get over 6 hours of RGB OSC data over three nights in the spring /summer of 2019 from the Bortle 3 skies of my current fav dark sky location: Pinnacles National Park. Ha data I’ve learned, really makes galaxies pop—the red of the Ha contrasting gloriously with the blues. But this is generally ill-advised when imaging with a DSLR or other OSC cameras—the Bayer matrix rendering 3 out of every 4 pixels useless. Regardless, I attempted adding Ha data to bring out the nebular regions and consequently make my image more ‘colorful’.  I’d gotten decent results with M31 and decided to try again with M51—especially since it appears ‘face on’. But I didn’t want to use valuable dark sky time for this and ended up taking these subs from my backyard. 8 min exposures with an uncooled camera in the summer under Bortle 8 skies is a recipe for extremely noisy images. 4 hrs of integration gave me the image below which I had to subsequently process heavily before blending with the RGB image to prevent the noise from degrading the hard earned RGB image.