M101 The Northern Pinwheel Galaxy

Posted on Sat 06 April 2024 in astro

April brought a cold front and what I thought were going to be some very clear skies for coming on to the new moon. I setup in the evening around 8ish expecting to have most of the night to gather some real data. As luck would have it, clouds rolled in about 10ish and hung out with me until 11ish. Oddly enough, I was able to still guide as PHD2's most recent update now has it setup to allow it to lose the star briefly without stopping the guiding. I was not sure about the images though, thinking they must be trashed. Not so. WPBB ended up throwing out 23 images (or 46 mins) of the data. I still ended up salvaging some subs, which is kind of cool.

M101 Pinwheel

Equipment List

  • Losmandy GM811G
  • Stellarvue SVX102T
  • PlayerOne Poseidon Color Camera with Sony IMX-571 sensor
  • Off Axis Guider
  • UV/IR Filter
  • PlayerOne Xena M Guide Camera

Aquisition

  • Lights: 120 Sub-frames at 120s 125 Gain and 20 Offset.
  • Darks: 30 frames at 120s
  • Flats: 30 frames at 0.41s
  • Flat Darks (Dark Flats?): 30 frames at 0.41s

Processing

Image Processing was done in PixInsight using their wonderful Weighted Batch PreProcessing Tool. This is a compilation of scripts to do everything from calibration all the way though background normalization.

  • WBPP
    • Master Dark Generation
    • Master Flat Generation
    • Light Frame Calibration
    • Cosmetic Correction
    • Bad frames rejection
    • Image registration
    • Local normalization
    • Image Integration
    • Auto Crop
  • Post
    • Dynamic Background Extraction
    • SPCC
    • EZ Deconvolution
    • EZ Denoise
    • Histrogram Stretch
    • EZ Star Reduction
    • Export To Tiff
  • Photoshop
    • Adjust exposure
    • Adjust contrast
    • export to jpeg

Acknowledgements

astrophotography