Hello everyone,

This is another step in my path to becoming comfortable with my new scope, and in getting my guiding down pat.

A few years ago when I became interested in following up on my life long interest in astro, I did a visual tour of the skies using a 10" Orion dobsonian scope. One of the prettiest galaxies I found was M99.

This effort is to consummate my initial impressions and present it here for you.

I didn't get much time on this, as it is essentially an experiment, about 12 x 300 seconds at gain 100 using my 2600 mc (one shot colour).

wiki says: "Messier 99 (NGC 4254) is a grand design spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Coma Berenices @ 49,000,000 light-years from the Milky Way galaxy. It has a morphological classification of SA(s), which is a spiral shape with loosely wound arms. It has a peculiar shape with one normal looking arm and an extended arm that is less tightly wound. "

This has a bit of processing in PI to remove to gradient, and some of the dust bunnies that I need to clean off my optical train. . As you can see my histogram is rather strange, so this one will get a redo.

Thanks for looking.

EDIT - Looking at this in the bright sunlight of a new day, I realize my stretch has clipped some data.



Just for giggles, I have made the original Pixinsight xisf file available to all and sundry. I had some nasty gradients. Its also vignetted a bit and there are dust balloons!

If anyone wants to see that, its there. Warning, its huge @ 240 mb. I think that particular file has some further possibilities, but they are beyond my Pix processing abilities.

Particularly:

-how to get rid of the dust balloons in PI? My flats do most of the work but still...

-how to fix the nasty gradients/vignetting in PI?

(in the meantime I will work on cleaning my glass and fixing the 105mm backfocus).

Thanks in advance, any advice is appreciated.

Best,

Ian