🌀The Whirlpool Galaxy from Paper Birch Observatory

Thank you for all who came to the 'galaxy tour' livestream the other week. There were some technical difficulties, but I'm sure I'll work those out as I go live more often. During the stream, I was able to do quick live stacks of several different Messier galaxies. Someone asked which was my favorite, and I picked this one, the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). What is your favorite galaxy to photograph?

The other night it was clear, so I put in a few hours on M51 before switching to Sh2-174 (The Valentine Rose Nebula) in Cepheus when that rose high enough. For just three hours on M51, I was impressed how clean and detailed it was already looking. For galaxies, I think the combination of a big telescope, mono camera with newer sensor tech. and dark, moonless skies is a pretty killer combo. At the same time I was shooting this, I was also capturing M81/M82 and IFN with a stock Canon T7 DSLR, a TAIR 3 telephoto lens (cheap, but good soviet lens), and the Sky-watcher Star Adventurer GTi for an upcoming YouTube video. So two AP kits on the opposite end of the price range, but both perfectly capable for creating stunning images.

For those interested, below are my technical details and processing overview for this image.

Tech. Details
📷 QHY miniCam8M
🔭 Askar 185APO
⚙️ A-P Mach2GTO
R: 31x120”, G:28x120”, B:28x120”
Total: 2 hr. 54 min.
Bortle 3, New moon

Processing Overview
All in PixInsight:
-WeightedBatchPreProcessing Script to handle Calibration, Registration, Integrations
-ChannelCombination to combine Red, Green, Blue channels
-DynamicBackgroundExtraction
-ImageSolver and PhotometricColorCalibration (default values)
-Russel Croman's BlurXterminator (Stellar 0.15, non-stellar 0.5)
-Starnet2 (separate stars from galaxy)
-GeneralizedHyperbolicStrech (stretch the galaxy with GHS and the stars with arcsinh)
-RangeSelection (made a blurred mask of the very high signal areas (galaxy core) and applied it to the image for the next step only)
-HDRMultiscaleTransform (6 layers, scaling function: Small Scale 32)
-Curves (both overall and added saturation)
-Unsharp Mask (used preview, and adjusted just slightly sharper than desired knowing noise reduction was next)
-Russel Croman's NoiseXterminator (Strength: 0.6, Iterations: 2)
-Save as JPEG, Quality: 100

Hope you are all getting some clear skies!
Nico