Featured image of post Widefield View of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101)

Widefield View of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101)

Widefield image of the star field around the Pinwheel Galaxy. Taken with a DSLR & cheap zoom lens. Raw stack as FITS available for download.

Another object that is high in the sky in the northern hemisphere: the Pinwheel Galaxy M101.

This image shows a widefield view of the area. It was acquired with a 20 EUR Sigma zoom lens at 195mm focal length (stopped down to f/7 for better quality) and a unmodified Nikon D3400. Everything was mounted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 (with Rowan Belt Mod). I collected almost 11 hrs over five nights.

Raw stack from PixInsight can be downloaded here. It was calibrated with bias and flat frames. Standard settings from WBPP (2024) were used, incl. CFA drizzle at scale 1. This is 128x 300s subexposures.

My processed imaged with details can be found on Astrobin. You can read about the this galaxy here on Wikipedia.

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