Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  HD122007  ·  HD122149  ·  HD122200  ·  HD122471  ·  HD122545  ·  HD122865  ·  HD123518  ·  M 101  ·  NGC 5422  ·  NGC 5443  ·  NGC 5447  ·  NGC 5449  ·  NGC 5450  ·  NGC 5451  ·  NGC 5453  ·  NGC 5455  ·  NGC 5457  ·  NGC 5461  ·  NGC 5462  ·  NGC 5471  ·  NGC 5473  ·  NGC 5474  ·  NGC 5475  ·  NGC 5477  ·  NGC 5484  ·  NGC 5485  ·  NGC 5486  ·  Pinwheel galaxy
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M101 in LRGB, Marc Mantha
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M101 in LRGB

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M101 in LRGB, Marc Mantha
Powered byPixInsight

M101 in LRGB

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Description

I finally had a stretch of 4 clear nights with no bright moon in the way! I don't even remember when was the last time that this happened. I decided to try M101 with my mono camera. Since I live in the city, I opted for short exposures (60s). I have a little over 17h of usable data that I captured. Sorting the subs and stacking took a while, but the end result is really worth it. Plus, I finally produced an image in which I like the stars colors and saturation. Their might be a bit too much green, but I'll keep it like this for now. I read that there are a lot of H II regions in this galaxy, I am tempted to try and narrowband Ha data in the future. 

A bit of detail on the target:

M101 is a large galaxy, with a diameter of 170,000 light-years. By comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of between 100,000 and 120,000 light-years. It has around a trillion stars. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small central bulge of about 3 billion solar masses. Its characteristics can be compared to those of Andromeda Galaxy.

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M101 in LRGB, Marc Mantha