M101 Pinwheel Galaxy (matthew.maclean)

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

Here is my project during Galaxy Season. For many reasons, this has been a learning experience...

(1) This is the first real imaging set with my new Altair 269C TEC cooled CMOS camera. I definitely understand why I read from others that making the transition from a DSLR is a process. Calibration definitely didn't work particularly well, but fortunately the camera shows virtually no "amp-glow" at all, so the dark frames aren't critical. I also think I need to take some longer exposures to get some more signal, so some things to work on for next time.

(2) Most of the integration is done in Astro Pixel Processor, but I am learning on a demo of PixInsight and did do a star reduction using it. Lots to learn there too before I am remotely comfortable with PI....

(3) I also for the first time shot with no light pollution filters at all (from a roughly Bortle 6 area) for the primary set of frames. That worked better than I thought, besides just a slight amount of yellowing in some of the dust lanes and a little bit of star blooming (which PI can helpfully reduce).

The galaxies are not ideal targets for a short focal length GT81, but I am happy something reasonable came out of it. Lots of lessons learned for the future....

- 52x180s RGB frames (no filter)

- 16x360s UHC frames (Baader 2" UHC-S filter)

- Calibration, registration, integration, and initial stretching done in APP.

- I also blended the RGB frames and the UHC frames in APP's RGB combine tool, adding just a little bit of accentuation to the red channel using the UHC-S.

- Star reduction done in PI.

- Denoise done in Topaz DeNoise AI

- 4X Interpolation done with Topaz GigaPixel AI (I think I'm already too close to under-sampling for Drizzle to work well....)

- Minor final color balance and clean up in GIMP

Northeast Imagers

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3433891
PixInsight job	MMC6GTRMO1MBVMTJNO6O8JF77C4QDAFY
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	14h02m58s.209
RA (top/left)	14h00m56s.909
RA (top/right)	14h00m51s.456
RA (bottom/right)	14h04m57s.494
RA (bottom/left)	14h05m06s.627

Dec (center)	+54°22′15″.38
Dec (top/left)	+54°41′58″.64
Dec (top/right)	+54°03′23″.46
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°02′24″.20
Dec (bottom/left)	+54°40′58″.29

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