astroblog

I’m no Photoshop expert, but here is a cleaned-up faint image of M51: the Whirlpool galaxy in Ursa Major and another image of the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra. At the time, the Whirlpool was in the brightest area of the sky-towards downtown, hence the grainy quality of the image due to light pollution. I had taken images both filtered and non, with an Orion light pollution filter, and the non-filtered image was a lot brighter. I then turned again to the Ring nebula and took an image of it, consisting of 50 stacked images with 0.775 sec exposure. Next taget: the constellation of Cygnus.