M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

March 17, 2026

One sub from tonight's test session. I'm playing around with the ZWO ASI715MC on the 600mm focal length CarbonStar 150. Seeing is crap, guiding is terrible, but I'm going to take as many 120 second subs as I can and see how it turns out. M51 and it's companion galaxy (NGC 5195) are about 25 million lightyears away. With this camera-scope combination, I'm running at 0.5 arcseconds per pixel, which is why the stars are bloated. I'm 11 subs into this imaging run and the galactic structure is pretty good. Half the fun of astrophotography is trying some crazy camera and scope combos just to see it works.