M101 - The Pinwheel and friends

[lukebl]

I rarely do any imaging these days and rashly sold off a lot of my astro gear, so I'm pretty rusty.

However, I'm getting my mojo back and captured this image of M101 The Pinwheel over the past couple of nights, and I'm reasonably pleased with it considering.

Captured with an ATIK 383L+, 200PDS Newtonian. 65 x 5 minute exposures Luminance. Just 22 x 2 minute exposures for R & B, binned 2x. Sythesised Green channel, which seems to have worked fairly well. Processed using ASTAP for the first time, which I must say is a vast improvement on DSS.  Images seem to suffer far less from gradients with it. And it's much faster.

Here it is with all the galaxies labelled using the neat astrometry function of ASTAP. It's telling me that I've captured some objects down to about mag 21.

Edited February 25, 2022 by lukebl