M101 or the Pinwheel galaxy is a truly fantastic galaxy with its sweeping asymmetrical arms, made obvious by it's face on view from Earth. I spent lot of time researching this object and there are a lot of hidden galaxies hiding behind this beauty. Interestingly this galaxy was where the spiral structure of galaxies was first discovered, changing our view of the universe. It has an open and well developed spiral structure, which is being affected by a density wave causing compression and star formation. There have been a number of SN and Nova with the most recent being 2015 - a luminous red nova.
After researching this object I had a number of goals in mind, show the faint outer arm structure as well as the many small galaxies scattered around. A big challenge considering the the bright moon and light pollution. I had a choice between maintaining detail or NR, I opted for detail so the image is a little grainy but I quite like it.
I think my collimation is in a much better place, resulting in much better guiding and not sooo soft stars, still think there is room for improvement as the FL is not what it should be so need to play around with the distance between the mirrors. Really starting to enjoy using this telescope now
Looking forward to moving to NB and getting to a dark site with this scope, should be able to get some good detail with decent seeing. All so exciting!
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