My road to a good M101 image

[frostynixon]

Hello everyone,

yesterday the weather finally allowed for some astrophotography again. I started imaging M101 two months ago, but didn`t gather much exposure time since then. At my first few tries i used an astronomik UHC filter (which was dumb in retrospect) which cuts out a severe portion of the starlight. Yesterday i left out the filter and captured some more frames.

I still have issues with an uneven field (which i suspect comes from a tilted coma corrector).

This is the current version of M101:

In total this is now 6 hours of exposure although 4 hours where taken with the UHC filter and therefore contain less information.

My next goal is to resolve the uneven field problem. Ultimately it would be nice if the final picture would show some structure in the core area.

best regards

[wxsatuser]

Bit blue but think you have a nice lot of data, bit more processing could bring out more structure.

[frostynixon]

Thanks for your comment! I always struggle a bit with color

[wxsatuser]

Same here.......the learning curve is steep.

[frostynixon]

Hello,

i was able to grab a few more frames yesterday. This is the final result:

During the new processing i tried to get it not as blue.

This is now 8.5 hours in total... To be honest i would have expected a little more. Somehow the orange core and the HII regions don`t show up as nicely as in other images.

The filament structure in the core region shows up a little bit, but my resolution is too bad to have it crisp..

I think until i have a better location to shoot from there`s not much sense in continuing. So i will shift my focus to another object. Any recommendations?

best regards

[frostynixon]

Hello again,

it was pointed out to me, that the last image is still quite blue and i have to agree. I changed the stacking parameters in DSS and the last version finally has a brownish/reddish core:

br

[Dr Hamzonian]

This is really beautiful work. Loved to see the progress in image improvement. Your last definetly looks best!

[frostynixon]

Thank you. Compared to the first version which i posted on astrobin, the image really has evolved quite alot. If anything this is a good example of the impact of integration time on image quality

I will probably add a couple of more hours to it, just because i think it`s a great target!