[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Going Deep from the WLDSP...

[semassuser at aol.com]

 From here in the WLDSP working M51 takes some real scraping to get a worthwhile image
The initial swirl is easy enough to get, but to get to the "bridge" and the haze around the companion takes a lot of "raking" - I call it "slow cooking"
It's tedious - it takes hours and hours.  While I am stacking M51 I can make a run to Taco Bell in Norwell. 
Add in LPRs and UV/IR filters in front of the camera - then that garbles the RGB colors.
... no sign of that in Matt's fine image
It gets windy here in the WLDSP our "Back River" creates a natural wind tunnel - proximity of the ocean and you are also promised rising and falling columns of air which makes guiding ugly.
Only positive is that M51 is circumpolar so you can cook a stackable image for a lengthy time
It's tree-zee and hill-zee around the WLDSP
j. ahola

    On Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 12:12:37 PM EDT, Mike McCabe <cartech2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:   

 ...which stands for Weymouth Landing Dark Sky Preserve.
Of course I joke about that, but Matt and Jim have to make the best of their situations, which they consistently do. Matt recently shared his latest rendition of M51, the Whirlpool galaxy in Canes Venatici. While Matt himself indicated that he wasn't especially impressed with the result, I believe that when everything is taken into consideration it really came out remarkable. 
It wasn't all that long ago that astrophotographers working from even dark sky locations struggled to get the apparent 'bridge' between M51 and NGC 5195, which by the way is an optical illusion. What we're really seeing there is the distorted arm of M51 overlaid on NGC 5195, which lies well behind the bigger galaxy. It is thought that a long-ago gravitation interaction between the two celestial bodies 'stretched' the arm of M51 in the way that we see it now, but that they are not currently physically connected.
But get the bridge Matt did, and a whole host of other details as well. In taking a close look at his image, there are at least a half-dozen galaxies in there, with two 'extras' being quite prominent even at nearly 16th magnitude.


While the main protagonists of course are the Whirlpool itself and its interacting dwarf neighbor, IC's 4277 and 4278 are easily discerned - even at distances of many hundreds of light years away!
The distance to IC 4278 is well known at ~230 million light years, but 4277 is less well studied. With some web-sleuthing I was able to come across one calculation that estimated it to be nearly 600 million light years distant. That's some OLD light collecting on that there camera sensor! 
File Under: What Bored Astronomers Do When It's Forever Cloudy
Mike M.  
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