Better yet.

Enlarged version is here.

Colorized attempt here.

This is my second attempt at M51, the first DSO I attempted to image.

Looking at the images from my first attempt, below, you can see I've made some progress in teasing out details.

This is my first attempt at a Deep Space object. It is "The Whirlpool Galaxy," M51.

While I'm proud of capturing my first DSO images, this one demonstrates some newbie mistakes. I left the ATK-2HS amp on by mistake, resulting in the characteristic amp glow in the upper-left corner of the image. Also, I should have taken more exposures, perhaps using K3CCDTools batch function.

Finally, my telescope collimation is off.

For all of that, I did manage to capture photons that travelled at least 37 million light years to get to me.

To put that in perspective, the light is probably at least 37 million years old. On Earth, we find the first fossils resembling the modern order of mammals in the Eocene Epoch, which is what we call the time-period from 54.8 - 33.7 million years ago.

This is the same image of M51 as the one above, with post processing done by Nick King, a member of QCUIAG.

It just shows what a long way I have to go in learning to process my images. That information was there, I just need to learn to pull it out using the tools in K3CCDTools and Photoshop.