The Whirlpool Galaxy is located 31 million light years away. It consists of two galaxies that accompany one another, the larger one being M51 (Messier 51) and the smaller one is NGC 5195.

This image was taken last week from my backyard Observatory.  I used my Celestron C8 telescope, with my Canon T3i (600D)

 

8 x 360sec. exp. at 1600iso

 

The RAW images where pre-processed in CS6, The TIFF files where stacked  using Deep Sky Stacker, then the combined image was further processed with Photoshop CS6e, using the NIC Collections "Detail Extractor".  These new tools have become my  favorite for image processing.