Latest space stuff....
This is the Pinwheel Galaxy, aka Messier Object 101. It's about 21 million light years from earth in the constellation Ursa Major (Big Dipper territory). According to Wiki, it's ~170,000 light years in diameter and has a trillion stars, give or take... My image is missing a lot of red that's present in better images of M101. It has huge amounts of ionized hydrogen gas which emits red light that isn't easily picked up by a DSLR. I just ordered a new camera and filters that will record this. Hoping to up my game a bit. Stay tuned.
This object is a little too small for my telescope but I've wanted to shoot it since I first saw a photo of it. I took about 4 hours of exposures, each 5 minutes long. About 30 minutes of exposures were not usable so this one has about 3.5 hours of exposure time. The images were stacked in software which helps reduce the noise inherent in long DLSR exposures. Message me if you are interested in the details... it's even more boring that the above for most so I'll skip here.
There are 8 galaxies visible in the original photo including M10 but I cropped it to make M101 larger so two or three went to the bit bucket. Some look like galaxies and are easy to spot while others are just balls of fuzz. Didn't know this when I was shooting it. Nice surprise.
The background esd a little splotchy on a big monitor so I darkened it a little to hide some noise... not sure why it was noisy but tired of spending time on the last 5%. Hoping my next image is improved with the new camera. It it isn't, I have some Visa bill explaining to do with the wife.
Enough... here it is:
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