Description:
M101 aka the Pinwheel Galaxy
20.87 million light years distant
+\- 170,000 light year diameter
Located behind Ursa Major
My last couple images I spent 7 nights on, one for Lum, one for each RGB channel, and three for H-Alpha. This year hasn’t been the greatest for weather until now so I wanted to see what I could do in three nights.
This time I spent one night on 1x1 binned Lum, one night on 2x2 binned RGB and one night on 2x2 binned H-Alpha. Here is the result! I’ll be honest it’s hard to tell the difference. Another reason I chose to bin is it was windy and I knew the resulting error would be less apparent @ 2x2 bin. I returned the binned data to original resolution by drizzle integration before processing! Just lucked out with a calm moonless night for Lum ☺️
H-Alpha data was blended into the luminance & red channels using pixel math by removing the continuum between the two masters and boosting the Lum/Red with each pertaining result.
Image consists of 22.7 hours of data:
35 x 600s Lum
21 x 1800s H-Alpha
25 x 300s Red
26 x 300s Green
25 x 300s Blue
+25 Flats, Darks, Bias (no darks for H-Alpha)
All data was captured at -20.02°c
Main equipment used:
William Optics FLT 132mm Refractor
Atik One 9.0 Monochrome CCD camera
Avalon Instruments Linear FR Mount
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