A couple of weeks back, during the last quarter Moon, I was able to get some decent data of M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. M101 is a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major and is 27 million light years away.

The image is from 160 minutes of LRGB data. That’s 90 minutes of luminance, and 23.3 minutes each of red, green and blue, binned 2×2. LRGB imaging takes advantage of the fact that we perceive most of the detail in an image from the black and white, or luminance part of the image and less detail from the color. I obtained 90 minutes of high-resolution black and white data and combined it with lower resolution color data to produce the image. The color was obtained by binning the pixels, or adding four pixels to create one. This allows for more data collected in a shorter period of time but at half the resolution.

Here is the result. Click on the picture to go to the gallery where you can see a full-sized version of the image.

160 Minutes LRGB (90:20:20:20 subs 300:200:200:200×18:7:7:7)