M100 and a lot of Space

[bdlbug]

This is my last galaxy image for this season

So, this has been a much harder to image process than anticipated, despite having IDAS D2 filter in front of everything the gradients I had were ridiculous - so the LED lighting put on path behind my house may have resulted in a darker garden, but the broadband sky glow really made a mess of the RGB integrations and merge. Software to the rescue; a combination of Pi with Deconv, DBE and photometric colour calibration  saved the day along with a lot of fun with Photoshop, AstroFlat and Topaz Denoise

Image details :  8hrs and 40mins total exposure in this image, 2hrs each channel with 40min extra in Lum... Taken between 15th-25th April in 6 sessions.
Equipment: ASI1600 MM-pro with Baader filters through AT106EDT refractor on AZ-EQ6GT,
Resolution: 1.13"x1.13" per pixel
Field of View: 1.47° x 1.11°

Wiki description for M100  (also known as NGC 4321)
M100 is a grand design intermediate spiral galaxy located within the southern part of constellation Coma Berenices. It is one of the brightest and largest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, located approximately 55 million light-years distant from Earth and has a diameter of 107,000 light years, roughly 60% the size of the Milky Way. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 15, 1781 and was subsequently entered in Messier's catalogue of nebulae and star clusters after Charles Messier made observations of his own on April 13, 1781. The galaxy was one of the first spiral galaxies to be discovered, and was listed as one of fourteen spiral nebulae by Lord William Parsons of Rosse in 1850.
NGC 4323 and NGC 4328 are satellite galaxies of M100; the former is connected with it by a bridge of luminous matter.

This  image has minimal cropping applied so, like the M51 I posted it shows the central galaxy in the background (and foreground) context of deep space.
This  image is also on Astrobin where it has been plate solved and mouse-over identifies  the other objects and galaxies in the image, thumbnail link below:

thanks for looking
Bryan

 

[Swoop1]

Very nice image Bryan. I like the big sky scope of the image.