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M101 - in your face, Tom Gray

M101 - in your face

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M101 - in your face, Tom Gray

M101 - in your face

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Description

My final attempt on a night of poor seeing, and atmospheric turbulence. M101 is enormous, 70% larger than our Milky Way, and lies around 26m LY away - as a result it has a low surface brightness. It has a high proportion of HII regions and despite the poor seeing, and smearing, these are clearly visible as brighter patches round the spiral arms (a number of these have their own reference in the NGC). Sadly the young blue star forming regions are not clear, and given the conditions, it was not worth adding colour data. I’ll try this agin, on a better night, at a smaller scale, so it is not quite so ‘in your face’ (even the plate solver had difficulty with this one) - it seems we’ve all grown used to social distancing!

ASTAP forced me to throw away at least a 1/3 of my data, so this comprises just under an hour of luminance frames. I managed to drag a little detail our of the atmospheric chaos with Startools.

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