M101 widefield

[GordonH]

Hi

I couldn't make up my mind whether or not to go out and try imaging last night because the weather was so bad during the day, ie snow in the afternoon and rain in the evening but it started to clear about 9pm and I eventually decided to give it a go at about 10pm. I thought I'd have a go at a galaxy for a change so I tried M101 as it was fairly high in the sky and away from most of the effects of light pollution. I set the computer to do 20x8 minute subframes unguided (one of these days I will be trying the autoguider), I didn't use longer than 8 minutes as when I tried a longer test exposure the core appeared a bit burnt out. Everything went fine until the dreaded meridian flip on the 19th subframe. Although the sky was clear ie no clouds the seeing wasn't too brilliant. There are a couple of other fuzzies which I am not sure about, one towards the top left and one towards the bottom right, I haven't had a look as to what they are yet, but any suggestions would be most welcome.

Taken with TMB 115 f7, no flattener (yet)

Paramount ME

Starlight Xpress SXVF H36 with broadband light pollution filter

Exposure 18x8 minutes unguided

Thanks for looking

Regards

Gordon

[Casus belli]

A fine collection of Fuzzies! Im hoping to image this area tonight (My first attempt so expect to hear a lot of loud swearing)

Top left (the edge on one) is probably NGC 5422 and bottom right is probably NGC 5474.

[CELESCOPE]

nice image Gordon , excellent capture mate

Rog

[centroid]

Very nice indeed Gordon, well done!!

BTW, it would be a lot easier to see your image, if you resized it to the SGL forum recommended max size of 800x600.

Dave

[GordonH]

Thanks guys

BTW, it would be a lot easier to see your image, if you resized it to the SGL forum recommended max size of 800x600

Thanks for that suggestion Dave, I will try and remember that next time as I know it can be a pain scrolling, that is the problem with these large format cameras, too many pixels

Regards

Gordon

[steppenwolf]

Commented (and annotated!) on another forum but worth saying again - excellent image!

[firelady]

Looks good, well done.

Gabrielle