Pinwheel Galaxy
M101 / NGC 5457 / SN 2023ixf
Altough our images often (though unintentionally) feature small extremely far & faint galaxies, M101 is the furthest away target that we have choosen so far. It is a whooping 21 million light-years away! Something to think about: if M101 was bright enough for the naked eye to see, it would look almost exactly the same size as the full Moon; it is however 517,383,697,916,666x further away than the Moon; so, how big is it??
M101 is classed as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is easy to see why :o
May 27, 2023 - SN 2023ixf supernova
A star blew up 7 days and ~21 million years ago! This star is currently brighter than the rest of that galaxy, billions of stars, combined. The blueish supernova is inside a spiral arm at the bottom, near a bright red nebula.
Because we have also imaged this galaxy about 2 years ago we can you show you before/after pictures.
April 3, 2021 version
Over the course for 5 nights we shot some new data, amassing 20 hours of useful exposure on M101 (this image does not include any of the previous data). All frames were taken with the Moon below horizon. Weather was hovering around 0°C on each night with relative humidity being a low 70%.
| Telescope | Skywatcher 200PDS (200/1000 Newton) |
| Filter | IDAS D2 (multi-bandpass light pollution filter) |
| Coma corrector | Skywatcher f/5 (0.9x) |
| Camera | Canon 7D Mark II |
| Resolution | 2365 x 1616 (cropped & scaled 50%) |
| Light frames | 242/260, 5m @ ISO 1600, 20h10m in total (out of 21:40h) |
| Dark frames | 53 (5, 12, 12, 12, 12) |
| Bias frames | 133 (20, 33, 30, 25, 25) |
| Flat frames | 102 (20, 19, 21, 21, 21) |
| Location | Bolton, UK |
| Local time | 2021-04-03 22:53 - 00:52 (34/35 frames) |
| 2021-04-05 21:58 - 03:35 (50/55 frames) | |
| 2021-04-06 22:04 - 03:25 (50/53 frames) | |
| 2021-04-09 22:28 - 04:56 (34/43 frames) | |
| 2021-04-12 21:37 - 04:48 (74/74 frames) | |
| Image center | 14h03m40s +54°22'22" |
| Field of view | 1°13 x 50' |
May 20, 2020 version
| Camera | Canon 400D |
| Telescope | Skywatcher 200/1000 Newton |
| Corrector | Vixen R200SS |
| Resolution | 3888 x 2592 (cropped & scaled to 738 x 801) |
| Light frames | 23/30, 300s (1:55h total) @ ISO 400 |
| Dark frames | 10 |
| Bias frames | 10 |
| Flat frames | 11 |
| Location | Bolton, UK |
| Local time | 2020-05-20 23:59:03 - 02:11:04 |
April 15, 2020 version
Just the raw stacked image, wasn’t good enough to process. Apparently a screw was broken in the mount making autoguiding impossible.
| Camera | Canon 400D |
| Telescope | Skywatcher 200/1000 Newton |
| Corrector | Vixen R200SS |
| Resolution | 3888 x 2592 (cropped & scaled to 864 x 543) |
| Light frames | 21, 180s (1:03h total) @ ISO 400 |
| Dark frames | 10 |
| Bias frames | 10 |
| Flat frames | - |
| Location | Bolton, UK |
| Local time | 2020-04-15 22:01:59 - 00:01:25 |