3 - 5 min. exposures with the SBIG STF-8300M (monochrome) CCD camera at -20C. Baader 2" UV/IR filter. Telescope configuration: EdgeHD 1400 with the Celestron 0.7x focal reducer (fl=2737, f/7.7), unbinned, yielding an image scale of 0.41 arc-seconds/pixel. Mount: Software Bisque Paramount MX. Captured with TSXPro with PEC enabled and ProTrack on. Focused using an AstroZap Bahtinov focus mask. Post processing: Calibration, alignment, stacking in ImagesPlus 5.0 using 9 dark frames, no bias frames and no flat frames (to my shame); DDP and curves in Nebulosity3. One pass of unsharp mask in ThumbsPlus. No autoguiding.
20121213_M51-CombAvg-Nebadj-TPadj.jpg