The good weather has continued recently and last Friday, the 13th March, we again had a good clear dark night (the moon was two days past last quarter). I thought I would try another object I haven't imaged before and this was Messier 101 - a face on spiral galaxy in the constellation of Ursa Major. The galaxy makes an equilateral triangle with the two end stars of the bear's tail, Alioth and Mizar. After 472x15s this is what I obtained:-
You can see a larger version of this image if you 'click' on it. You can see the well-displayed spiral arms of this galaxy with its blue patches of newly formed stars. The galaxy is relatively nearby at 21 million light years from us (compare this to the 2.5 million light years distance of the Andromeda galaxy). All auto settings were used on the Dwarf (this includes the astro filter) and in Stellar Studio. The image has been binned x2 and the gain and saturation increased slightly in Photoshop. The first frame was taken at 22:08 UT and the last at 00:28 UT on the 14th. Midpoint 23:18.
There are a number of other smaller galaxies in the same field of view and below I include an annotated version of this image.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026
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