Hello/salut everyone,
I have wanted to image M100 for a long time. The skies briefly cleared for me on the weekend and so I packed up and headed for rural areas south of my city.
M100 is an interesting Messier target, a so called grand-design galaxy. Its a prominent member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies in Coma. This galaxy has a very bright core in a 7' x 6' oval halo. This galaxy is known for its star formation regions. I am afraid that I may have blown out the core a bit in this image, que sera sera.
The clouds began to form spontaneously over my dark site, and so my guiding became trash with lost stars and all of the fun associated with that.
Processing in this one is fairly basic, no deconvolution, no star reduction. I cropped about 15% of the image to remove the vignetting.
I squeezed in about 2 hours of integration before being chased home. I will take a brief rest before coming at this with PI again to see if I can improve my processing.
While M100 is nice, the surrounding pack of small galaxies is fun to note, and about 10 of them can be seen in the FOV.
As always, thanks for looking.
CS
Ian
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