M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB (rhedden)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com) · Contains: Coma Pinwheel · M 99 · NGC 4254 · Virgo Cluster Pinwheel

M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB

M99, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy (besides M101), is one of the tougher Messier objects to image. Spanning only 5.3 arcminutes, it shines at about magnitude 9.9. With the bright star HIP 60089 nearby, it presents a real challenge for color imaging.

This image was obtained on two different nights with wind and below average seeing. To make matters worse, my Lodestar X2 autoguider was temporarily broken, so I had to revert to my old Orion SSAG, which is much noisier. I was surprised at how well the galaxy's details turned out, considering the conditions, and considering that there are less than 3 hours of luminance subs.

This image was obtained with short (225 s) subs binned 2x2, in contrast to most of my previous galaxy images, which were mostly oversampled and binned 1x1 to allow more aggressive noise reduction and sharpening. Some major upgrades in my processing workflow allowed me to accomplish the same things with 2x2 binning and 1/4th the sub length, giving me 4 times the subs to work with. I think I will continue imaging galaxies at this image scale, since the result is better than my usual!

11/6/2015: The "B" revision has the saturation turned down on the bright orange star only (processing done in GIMP). Bringing out the colors in the galaxy required pushing the saturation quite a bit, and the star color became oversaturated.

Original
B
Final
C

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4198663
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB

M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB

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M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB

M99 (Pinwheel galaxy in Coma Berenices) in LRGB

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