M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

[Gerr]

Last night I had a go at this face-on spiral galaxy in Ursa Major (being only 21million light years away!!!).

My second attempt and with no wind, virtually no moon and no clouds either things were looking good for me.

I am still trying to avoid spending loads on new equipment and so my old faithful Canon 650D and 10 year old SW200P reflector were employed for the job (like they usually are). My mount is pretty decent though (HEQ5 Pro) and I managed excellent guiding achieving 0.29 RMS error only. Even so I still had to discard nearly a third of my lights due to stars refusing to stay round!! Probably due to mount payload being maxed out with a big scope and extras.

Method: 68 Lights (150 secs at ISO800), 2hrs 50mins total.  Optolong L-Pro filter. Bias and Flat frames (20 of each).

Stacked in DSS and processed in Photoshop CS2 (I don't use anything else as it usually involves more cash).

Hope you like?

Gerr.

Results (original and cropped images):

 

[Stargazer33]

Nice colour and detail. Just goes to show that you don't need to spend £££ to get great images.

[jacko61]

Great photos. I'll be aiming at M101 next time out. 

Graeme