Sunday, May 4, 2014

M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy

(click on image for full resolution image)

M101 is a face-on spiral galaxy in Ursa Major in a distance of 21 million light years. Despite being in the Messier catalog, it was actually discovered by Pierre_Mechain in 1781.

This is the first image that I completely processed in Pixinsight (calibration and registration, stacking and post-processing). It's also the first time that I blended Ha data into a galaxy image.

11 comments:

  1. Me gustaría saber qué es ese centro, esa luz brillante en el centro del espiral, ¿Qué es?

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  2. Me gustaría saber qué es ese centro, esa luz brillante en el centro del espiral, ¿Qué es?

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    1. Hi Bernabe,

      If I understand your question right (I don't speak spanish), you are asking what the bright center of the galaxy is?

      At the center of a galaxy you have the highest density of stars (because of the gravitational forces). That's why the center is so bright. We have the same effect in our galaxy and if you look at other images (e.g. https://mstriebeck-astrophotography.blogspot.com/2018/09/m31-great-andromeda-galaxy.html) you see similar effects.

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  3. This image is on Android TV screen saver.

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    1. Hi Gianni! Thanks - I always love it if people tell me that one of my images is on their TV :-)

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  4. Sir I saw this wallpaper on my Android Tv and got curious how do you capture such high resolution images of such deep space objects... ???

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    1. Hi Alan, it's a lot of time but also quite some money for the equipment. You can see on the side my equipment (telescope, mount, camera). We then take many shorter exposures (e.g. 10 minutes) of each primary color (red, green, blue) plus with a luminance filter to increase details. We then "stack" these together. This creates images that have less "noise" (background noise from my light polluted location, but also noise from the camera itself). Finally we combine the Red, Green, Blue and Luminance images and enhance them with special software.
      It's a complex process that takes quite some time ... But is totally worth it :-)

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  5. I ALWAYS SEE THESE PICTURE IT ON MY ANDROID TV EITHER! Congratulations Mark!!

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    1. Thank you - yes, I was able to get some of my images into the Chrome/Android background colletion :-)

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  6. Replies
    1. It takes a while - but it's worth the effort and patience!

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