Pinwheel Galaxy - M101 plus Supernova 2011fe

[Bob Andersson]

Hi folks,

I've been grabbing subs of the Pinwheel Galaxy (aka M101) over the last month or so as the opportunity arose. Despite some tracking problems I'm happy enough with the result to share:

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  7 x 1,000 seconds Red, 9 x 1,000 seconds Green, 5 x 1,000 seconds Blue and 1 x 200 seconds Blue
  TEC 140 'scope (980mm focal length, f/7) plus ML16803 camera
  

By the way, that 200 second Blue sub crept in by mistake but it doesn't seem to have hurt things!

Processing: a brief summary. Usual processing in PixInsight summed all the subs to produce a luminance image which was star masked and HDRMultiscaleTransform-ed to bring out a little more structure in the galaxy. The RGB subs were stacked separately and then combined with the luminance image to produce a colour image - maybe I overdid the colour boost but I wanted to emphasise colour variation in the Pinwheel Galaxy itself. Both were fed into Photoshop. The luminance was spilt into "Just Stars" and "No Stars" versions and the "Just Stars" version was fed back through PixInsight for a spot of deconvolution before appearing once again in PhotoShop. The "No Stars" version was cleaned up and for the first time I used the Topaz Labs "InFocus" Photoshop add-on which produced some worthwhile improvements. The processed "No Stars" and "Just Stars" images were combined (Layers, Screen mode) and then the colour image, after a little tweaking, was used to add colour (Layers, Colour mode).

Here's a slightly closer view (roughly a 50% crop factor) of the Pinwheel Galaxy framed to include a couple of other more distant galaxies:

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There's a bright blue star in M101. The colour may be due to the length of time (nearly a month) between the Blue subs and the rest but the object itself is SN 2011fe as I'm sure most already know (I didn't!). You can read about it here at Wikipedia. I've highlighted it in the following image:

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From the Wiki article: "The star, formerly a white dwarf, is located in Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, 21 million light years from Earth." My first supernova and the capture wasn't even planned.

Bob.

[Digz]

Great images and a nice write up

[Viv]

That's stunning Bob.

I love all the fuzzies around as well.

[Spikey]

That's an image to be proud of Bob. Good write up on the processing, it will help other people I'm sure.