M101 Pinwheel Galaxy (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: M 101 · NGC 5457 · NGC 5461 · NGC 5471

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

Here is my image of the awesome Pinwheel Galaxy, cataloged as Messier 101. It is located high in the northeastern sky below the Big Dipper's handle in the Spring about 23 million light years from Earth. This incredible face-on spiral galaxy measures 170,000 light-years across, nearly twice the size of our dear old Milky Way and it contains at least 1 trillion stars. You can see numerous regions of star formation in its spiral arms producing new hot blue stars.

Faint, distant galaxies require lots of exposure time to bring out their detail. Even more imaging time would further reduce noise, but life is short and who has the patience for that? This image is a stack of thirty 180-second ISO 3200 exposures at 2350mm focal length, calibrated with 10 dark frames, 20 bias frames, 20 flat frames. I did intermediate processing with StarNet++ to remove the background stars and then processed the stars and galaxy separately in Photoshop.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	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

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	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

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4503881
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

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Image Index:

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

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