While capturing 1 minute L subs for Copeland's Septet Thursday evening, seeing started to deteriorate to > 2.5" around midnight. Clouds were forecast for Friday evening, so I figured I'd collect some RGB for a bright and high galaxy. M106 looked like the perfect choice.
I intended to come back and collect more RGB and L next month, but Friday evening turned out to be very special. High thin clouds were moving in around 8 PM as forecast. Not knowing exactly what might happen, I decided to capture 1-minute L subs for M106.
As I've seen before, high thin clouds usually equate to excellent seeing, and that was indeed the case! I kept shooting L subs all night. I was amazed to be able to capture 265 1-minute subs between 1.2" and 2.2" !!! Many were a bit dim behind the wispy clouds, but the vast majority were clear. (-:
What you see here is only 50-minutes of each RGB channel (5-minute subs) with 180 of the lowest FWHM 1-minute L subs (3 hours) having an average FMHW of 1.8". This reduced to 1.3" after deconvolution.
My reference images was
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190317.html**** Added 15 hours of Ha from 5/21/22 - 5/25/22 ****
"A swirling disk of stars and gas, M106's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and red dust lanes near the nucleus. The core of M106 glows brightly in radio waves and X-rays where twin jets have been found running the length of the galaxy. An unusual central glow makes M106 one of the closest examples of the Seyfert class of galaxies, where vast amounts of glowing gas are thought to be falling into a central massive black hole. M106, a relatively close 23.5 million light years away, spans 60 thousand light years across."
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