If you are not in the astro community you may not know that a supernova was discovered in M101, a.k.a. The Pinwheel Galaxy, on May 19 by an amateur astronomer, Koichi Itagaki. Designated as 2023ixf the supernova happens to be the closest to to Earth in a decade and should still be visible through the summer. There have been hundreds of fine images of this galaxy posted over the last month so my image is a bit late. Ironically I started imaging this in May not realizing there was an active supernova - my last image of this was from 2017 when my skills were very low. Although it was finished in mid June, I only now had time to processed it.

Located in Ursa Major approximately 21 million light-years from us M101 is an immense face-on spiral galaxy 170,000 LY across containing over a trillion stars. The outer arms consist of young, hot, blue star clusters that appear as 'knots' on my image. Also, very large pink-red clouds composed of molecular hydrogen are scattered throughout the arms. These nebular regions are large enough to have their own NGC designation and are home to intense star formation. My favorites include the NGC 5450 on the lower right, NGC 5471 to the left of the leftmost outer arm, NGC 5462 on the left outer arm, and NGC 5461 just below NGC 5462. The very large star adjacent to NGC 5461 is the supernova (SN 2023ixf). A dwarf galaxy, NGC 5477, is located on the far left side of the image.

I captured this over several nights trying to avoid crappy weather and smoke from the wildfires as best I could - a lot of collected data was not used. In addition to capturing natural color with my ASI294MC I decided to capture some Ha data using the IDAS NBZ filter. I separated the NBZ data into RGB channels using the red data since that is where the hydrogen wavelength would fall - of course using a monochrome camera with narrow pass Ha filter would be the optimal way to collect the Ha data.Dates: 5-26-23, 5-27, 5-28, 5-29, 6-4, 6-10