M101 and NGC 5474 (rhedden)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: M 101 · NGC 5457 · NGC 5461 · NGC 5474 · NGC 5477

M101 and NGC 5474

M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy in Ursa Major, is one of the most frequently imaged deep sky objects, while its next door neighbor, NGC 5474, is less frequently seen. These two galaxies interacted gravitationally in the past, resulting in some distortion that is especially noticeable in the off-center core of NGC 5474. Both galaxies lie about 20 million light years distant.

This image is the first project I completed using exclusively the Chroma Technology filters I purchased last fall. I am quite pleased with the performance of the filter set, which represents a substantial upgrade over the 2012 vintage Baader filter set I had been using with the Esprit 100ED refractor. I was able to obtain quite a lot of RGB data for this project, so I decided to boost the color saturation a bit to show off the results. I hope I did not go overboard.

I ran the luminance channel through the tremendously useful program ASTAP, and the plate solving feature indicates a limiting magnitude of about 21.5 in this image, which is close to the limit I can achieve (21.9) at my Bortle 4+ backyard imaging site. There are quite a lot of background galaxies visible at full resolution, and I only applied a little bit of noise reduction to avoid smearing them too much.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7582455
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M101 and NGC 5474

M101 and NGC 5474

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M101 and NGC 5474

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