M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy

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This nice face on spiral galaxy is 27 million light years distant and has a magnitude of 7.9. It is also known as NGC 5457. I find it interesting that the core is offset from the center.

The two images below are from the same data set. The second one is processed for the full wide field. This one for is just M101.

This is the full field.

The images above were taken remotely with the equipment in New Mexico on the nights of 05/27/22, 05/31/22 and 06/02/22. The imaging system was a Canon 200mm lens and a QSI 690 camera. It is an RGB composite (as detailed below) with a total exposure time of 8.5 hours.>/p>

Filter

Exposure Count Binning
Red 170 min 17 x 10 min 1x1
Green 170 min 17 x 10 min 1x1
Blue 170 min 17 x 10 min 1x1

All processing was done with PixInsight.

Previous best. Really just an experiment.

Two 2 minute exposures were combined to create this image. The LX200 was operating at f/3.3 with the 416XT camera.  Taken on July 23, 1998 at the Table Mountain Star Party.