M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy (Aaron Freimark)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: M 101 · NGC 5447 · NGC 5449 · NGC 5450 · NGC 5451 · NGC 5453 · NGC 5455 · NGC 5457 · NGC 5461 · NGC 5462 · NGC 5471 · Pinwheel galaxy

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M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

Powered byPixInsight

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

Happy new year all! This is something I've wanted to photograph for quite a while: M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. It is around 21 million light years away, contains around a trillion stars, and it's slightly larger than our own Milky Way. From Earth, the Pinwheel Galaxy appears a bit larger than the moon, but of course it is really, really faint.

I captured this last week from Cold Spring, with 796 photos over two days. Each photo was a 30 second exposure.

Processing help from Steve! https://youtu.be/FWdJh0rMutE

Preprocessing

WeightedBatchProcessing to calibrate
SubframeSelector to remove a few subs with high eccentricity
Image Registration
Local Normalization
Image Integration
Drizzle Integration
Dynamic Crop

RGB

LinearFit R to B
Channel Combination to create RGB
Background Neutralization
Color Calibration
SCNR 0.7
EZ Soft Stretch
Extract Luminance to RGB_L
Histogram Transformation RGB_L, bringing up the black point slightly
LRGBCombination with Saturation at 0.3 to apply RGB_L back onto RGB — this will increase saturation!
Repeat two additional times, boosting color nicely

EZ Decon
EZ Denoise
Histogram Transformation to make a non-linear image

RGB+L

LRGB Combination to apply L to RGB
Curves Transformation
Unsharp Mask (on a masked image created by the process in Steve’s video)

Original
Final
B

B

Title: Backed-off the blue

Uploaded: ...

Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association (MHAA)
Northeast Imagers

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Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5385804
PixInsight job	LZYBAV430W4KQCK91622U0U777WPZUUW
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	14h03m07s.240
RA (top/left)	14h05m43s.684
RA (top/right)	14h04m33s.258
RA (bottom/right)	14h00m27s.973
RA (bottom/left)	14h01m42s.664

Dec (center)	+54°23′27″.37
Dec (top/left)	+54°04′39″.94
Dec (top/right)	+54°50′18″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°42′01″.69
Dec (bottom/left)	+53°56′32″.45

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M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

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Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

Revision title: Backed-off the blue

Equipment

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Description

Comments

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B

Sky plot

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In these public groups

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