M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy | Astrobiscuit | Page 1

humble folio Apr 19, 2024, 4:55 AM

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Sharing my image of the Pinwheel Galaxy this spring season. It's difficult to get imaging time during cloudy Seattle spring, and each session requires me to drive far out, so I did the best I could with my limited imaging time. To get as good data as possible, I only imaged when the moon was not out, and when M101 was high in the sky. In total, I collected 3h 18m of OSC data, and an additional 2h 00m of dual-band data through an Antlia ALP-T filter. Only the red (Ha) channel was used.

GSO 6"f4 Newtonian
Paracorr 2
IMX571 camera
iOptron HAE29
3h 18m OSC (180s) worth captured on 6th Mar, 13 Apr 2024
2h 00m HA (300s) (APL-T filter) captured on 12 Apr 2024
Total 5h 18m

This was my first time trying to combine HA data in a galaxy and I had some trouble trying to figure it out. Eventually I used the idea of continuum subtraction to subtract a scaled R from the Ha, then recombining it with RGB. The result is a crop of the full wide-field (will post below). Surprisingly, I think I managed to still make out supernova SN2023ixf (much dimmer now) and was really excited with how many tiny background galaxies I managed to find in the image. I hope it was worth the long drive out each session!

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For those interested, here is the wider field which includes some other interesting dwarf galaxies like NGC5474, NGC5477, as well as some larger background ellipticals NGC5473, NGC5485, NGC5486, and the peculiar NGC5422.

blissful mist Apr 19, 2024, 5:38 AM

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Nice photo mate! Really nice.

rapid lake Apr 19, 2024, 5:39 AM

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Beautiful detail! Even at that crop! love the color too

whole prism Apr 19, 2024, 10:48 AM

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Gorgeous photo! 👌

humble folio Apr 19, 2024, 5:11 PM

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Thank you everyone for the kind comments! One day I hope to be able to do a long integration to reveal some of the very faint fuzzy structures around the galaxies in the field. It's going to be tricky though since I cannot image from home (I live in an apartment).

humble folio Apr 19, 2024, 5:15 PM

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rapid lake Beautiful detail! Even at that crop! love the color too

Thank you. I struggled a lot with the colour processing. First was trying not to go overboard with the Ha, and then how much to push the overall saturation. I know it's popular these days to try to make it very saturated (blue) with a lot of green removed. I think I was influenced by that kind of processing which is what you see here, but I think I'll try a more 'natural' approach like what HST did in the future. The fundamental colors are using spectral colour calibration so I hope it's at least representative. Do you also feel like my background is too dark?

rapid lake Apr 19, 2024, 7:55 PM

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The only dark thats objectively too dark is clipped, and this doesn't look that way at least. Nice natural and deep feeling to it w/o being crushed

#M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy