M51 - It's Interacting

 Good afternoon reader.  Some months on since my last update when the aurora came to visit, I'm back again with my latest image.  Imaging opportunities have been slim this winter.  It's been a wet one for sure, and typically, as we move into Spring and enter BST, the weather sorts itself out, and starts giving imaging opportunities on school nights when I should really be thinking about getting my head down at a sensible time.

A few weekends ago, I had chance to spend some hours on a popular target, M51, aka The Whirlpool Galaxy.  It's taken a few more weeks to get around to processing the image, but I managed it.  The main image has M51 in the middle of it.  You might say that it appears quite small n the frame, but the really please thing with this image is the fact that in the rest of the field of view, you can see at least half a dozen other galaxies if you know what to look for.

But, to get the most out of this image, I've also produced a cropped version. which shows the main galaxy pair much closer up.  This is only a reduced resolution copy, but I can assure you, at full resolution, this show a lot more detail than what you can probably pick up from a web page!

Not much more to report at the moment.  Hopefully there will be more opportunity in the coming weeks to at least get a few more sessions under the belt while we still have true darkness at our disposal.  Until then, clear skies!