M101 Pinwheel widefield

[happy-kat]

Just in time after no clear nights for me for nearly two months I get two in a row, whoop whoop.

M101 Pinwheel galaxy

A challenging environment as the galaxy was quite high and infringing the almost over head LED street light. Nice to be outside listening to the wildlife and the local fox passed me several times within feet giving me only a cursory look.

Virtuoso mount (powered by a LiFePO4 battery and using a synscan v3 handset sat on top of a small wooden unit that I sit beside).

Canon 1100d (not modded) vintage 1973 200mm lens with a flocked 10 inch bazooka tube

f4 ISO 800

Camera controlled by DSLR Controller on a 4 inch Android phone (I was using my 7 inch tablet to run Stellarium)

79 lights (mainly 30 seconds plus a few 45 and 20 seconds) just over 42 minutes 

Flats and dark flats (bias I didn't find helped this image process)

Stacked in DSS and the autosaved FITS file processed in StarTools.

Processing was quite tricky due to severe light pollution and very strong chromatic aberration from the lens. I manipulated the blue channel separately before bringing the red and green back into the image, all done in StarTools.

Quite a few fuzzy in the area. Plate solved on Astrometry.net

 

Edited April 28, 2018 by happy-kat
reprocessed the pinwheel