M101 - The Northern Pinwheel Galaxy in Ursa Major

M101 Planewave U16M

M101 - Galaxy in Ursa Major
Mag 7.9 RA 14:03.2 Dec +54 21' 22 arcminutes

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From SEDS.ORG:

Discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. Messier 101 (M101, NGC 5457) was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781, and added as one of the last entries in Charles Messier's catalog. It was one of the first "spiral nebula" identified as such, in 1851 by William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse.

Although extended 22 arc minutes on photos and quite bright, only the central region of this galaxy is visible in smaller telescopes, best at low powers. Suggestions of the spiral arms can be glimpsed in telescopes starting from 4 inch as nebulous patches. On photographs, however, the Pinwheel Galaxy M101 is revealed as one of the most prominent Grand Design spirals in the sky. While quite symmetric visually and in very short exposures which show only the central region, it is of remarkable unsymmetry, its core being considerably displaced from the center of the disk. Halton Arp has included M101 as No. 26 in his Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies as a "Spiral with One Heavy Arm".

The distance of M101 has been determined by the measurement of Cepheid variables with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994/95 to be about 24 +/- 2 million light years. 

It has a linear diameter of over 170,000 light years and is thus among the biggest disk galaxies, and its total apparent visual brightness of 7.9 mag corresponds to an absolute brightness of -21.6 magnitudes, or a luminosity of about 30 billion (3*10^10) times that of our sun.

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Scope: Planewave 12.5" CDK
Camera: Apogee U16M w Astrodon GenII LRGB
Mount: Paramount ME (MKS 5000 upgrade)
Luminance 26x10 min
R/G/B 14/11/17 x 10 min each
H-Alpha: 21x20min
OIII: 16x20min
Images acquired w TheSkyX Professional and CCD-Commander
Processing in PixInsight:
- WBPP script
- Luminance processed further with DBE, BlurX, HT and Curves, NoiseX, 3x LocalHistogramEqualization
- RGB combine followed by DBE, SPCC, BlurX, HT and Curves, 3xLocalHistrogramEqualization, NoiseX
Processing in Photoshop:
- Luminance highlights sharpened with a 10 pixel High Pass filter
- Luminance then layered onto RGB as Luminosity layer
- Curves and Vibrance / Saturation adjusted
- slight crop
- cleanup
- Ha added to Red at 100% using Screen blend
- OIII added to Green and Blue at 50% each using Screen blend

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Lucknow, Ontario, Canada
May, 2023 AFTER the Supernova (grrr)

Here is the same image without the OIII data added:

M101 HaLRGB

And here is the H-Alpha image:

M101 H-Alpha

And here is the OIII image:

M101 OIII