M100 and associates

On the same evening I was photographing the four day old Moon (the 21st April 2026), I also had a go at imaging the spiral galaxy M100 in the south-west part of the constellation of Coma Berenices. M100 is one of the largest and brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. Here is what I obtained with the Dwarf 3 after 448x15s (1 hour 52 minutes):-

M100 lies at the centre of this frame (click on the image to obtain a better view). The first frame was taken at 22:10 BST and the last at 00:32 on the 22nd. The gain was 60 and the Astro filter was employed. The saturation has been increased in photoshop and the image binned x2. Here is a cropped version of the unbinned image:-

The nice spiral nature of the arms can be seen more clearly, as can a number of other galaxies in the same field (particularly NGC4312 at the lower right). In fact the whole image above has numerous galaxies in it and I have produced an annotated version below:-

I haven't labelled all the galaxies in this image, just some of the brighter ones (again click on the image to get a better view).

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026