I have added several photos to the archive today, including a series of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. This object was one of the first things that I imaged. I posted my first processing and an updated one I did today. I also posted a decent version of some data that I took in April of 2005. This provides a good comparison both changes in processing and better data acquisition.
The older version of M51 clearly suffers from too little exposure time.
The image is noisy. I was suffering at the time from bad circular
gradients from poor positioning of my focal reducer. The 2005 data
is pretty good in luminance (65 minutes) but short in RGB (30 minutes each).
The RGB also suffers from being taken binned 2×2, a practice I do
not recommend in light polluted locations such as I have here.