Thanked: 9,663 Times
After 2 months of cloudy nights, got a couple of nights of clear skies. Managed to shoot a few targets on the nights of 17th and 18th May. With the pier setup, I spent an hour on 17th for polar alignment. After this, it took just 10 minutes on 18th night (or early morning on 19th at 2:45AM) to open the enclosure and start capturing.
M51 Whirlpool Galaxy:
The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. This galaxy is situated at 23.16 million light years from the earth and has a radius of 30,000 light years. This galaxy is 400 million years old, a child compared our own Milky Way which is 13.5 billion years old. This image is an integration of 1 hour and 12 minutes (24 images of 3 minute exposure each)