M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy - LRGB (Jon Main)

M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy - LRGB

Revision title: Revised

This is an image I captured on May 4th and 5th, 2024. After acquiring my data I noticed that the sub exposures were all very well behaved. They were nearly free of any aberrations due to collimation, tracking, or tilt. So, I decided to push it a bit with a 2x upscaled drizzle integration. I was very surprised by the amount of detail recovered during drizzle.

"The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101, M101 or NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781"

"M101 is a large galaxy, with a diameter of 170,000 light-years. By comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of 87,400 light-years. It has around a trillion stars. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small central bulge of about 3 billion solar masses. Its characteristics can be compared to those of Andromeda Galaxy."

"M101 has a high population of H II regions, many of which are very large and bright. H II regions usually accompany the enormous clouds of high density molecular hydrogen gas contracting under their own gravitational force where stars form. H II regions are ionized by large numbers of extremely bright and hot young stars; those in M101 are capable of creating hot superbubbles. In a 1990 study, 1,264 H II regions were cataloged in the galaxy. Three are prominent enough to receive New General Catalogue numbers—NGC 5461, NGC 5462, and NGC 5471" (Source: Wikipedia)

Original
C
Final
D

C

Title: Full Field of View

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Revised

Description: My original edit has been bothering me for a few days. There was some artificial detail that was an artifact of deconvolution. Although the tool is normally very good it was introducing false detail in this case. This version preserves authenticity while still applying full use of my normal processing techniques.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9836363
PixInsight job	GOD4JZC7MP8USM0E4GJSLB2VHGVDSGOY
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	14h03m12s.506
RA (top/left)	14h04m16s.266
RA (top/right)	14h04m27s.118
RA (bottom/right)	14h02m08s.100
RA (bottom/left)	14h01m58s.286

Dec (center)	+54°20′54″.85
Dec (top/left)	+54°06′54″.64
Dec (top/right)	+54°33′46″.87
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°34′53″.36
Dec (bottom/left)	+54°07′58″.98

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