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| Messier 101 -- The Pinwheel Galaxy -- in Ursa Major. The spiral and star clouds just emerging from the background. DSLR camera at prime focus of 1,800mm FL Cassegrain telescope. A first attempt that shows great promise. |
All right, I know this is a weak and maybe ugly image of a beautiful gem of the night sky but to me it represents great promise. This was a target-of-opportunity imaging attempt I made after shooting comet photos. I keyed in M101 (for object no. 101 in the famous Messier Catalog) on the telescope's control pad and with loud whirring the telescope swung up and to the north. Peering through the eyepiece at stars in a light-polluted sky, I manually moved the telescope ... was that a little cloud in space, or a floater in my eye? Back again, yeah! Barely visible, but it's there! That's what a galaxy looks like through a small telescope: a little, dimly-glowing cloud. I shot a test image and sure enough, there's something there. I shot a series of images, a series of "darks" -- covering the telescope and recording the electronic noise of the camera's image sensor -- and called it quits for the night. So, after processing I got what you see above. I know I need to boost the camera's ISO (sensitivity) and maybe the exposure time for each image. The image shown here is, however, the best photo I've ever made of an object outside of the Milky Way -- the spiral arms show, star clouds and all. I know now I can do this and I hope the next attempt will actually be beautiful for others to see!
The Pinwheel Galaxy is a face-on spiral galaxy 21 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_Galaxy
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