M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy

Is described here in Wikipedia.

It is an interacting spiral galaxy about 31 million light years away, so we are seeing it as it looked 31 million years ago, about half way between now and the time the Dinosaurs went extinct.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 3 frames of 15 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software. This was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack them into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.