In April of 2021 I’d had enough of seeing the same four walls for the past year and a bit. When Fort Griffin started to open back up for astronomers I gladly accepted their hospitality and spent a night out at the Fort. One of the objects that I imaged that night was Messier 51. While I’ve imaged that target a few times I’ve never really been happy with the results. Such is the malady of astrophotographers everywhere, we’re never really happy with the data we have for long. It’s a disease, I’m sure of it.
The results were good for me at the time but things have changed. Software has improved and techniques have been refined. Personal taste has evolved as well to the point where I felt the need to reprocess the data when I woke up at 3:45a this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. Fortunately with the new-ish PC processing that data took about 30 minutes to get to the final stack before the Pretty Picture making began. Total time was still less than an hour and I’m much happier with this result. A technique demonstrated by legendary astrophotographer Adam Block using the RC Astro StarXTerminator and BlurXTerminator plugins for PixInsight netted a much more detailed and visually pleasing image that is closer to what I’ve seen from other astrophotographers. I’m fairly pleased with this but I think another outing to Fort Griffin during galaxy season is in my not too distant future.
