M100 Spiral Galaxy

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menardre
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M100 Spiral Galaxy

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Last night my goal was to troubleshoot Falcon Rotator. The last few imaging sessions the rotator did not acquire the correct angle. I contacted SGP to see if they had made any changes to version 4.1 (which I had just installed) regarding rotator. They said that yes, indeed they had made changes to comply with new ASCOM rotator requirements. In order to troubleshoot I needed to provide them with logs.

So I went out last night fully expecting to spend the night doing troubleshooting. The Moon was bright so I did not think I was missing much. I setup my system to image M100 in Coma Berenices. It was fairly close to the Moon but I did not think I was going to finish the imaging anyway.

To my surprise this time I had no problems with platesolving and using the Falcon rotator. The angle was within 1 degree on the second attempt... like it used to be.

So I continued on and took 100 images of M100 using 2 minute subs, 2x2 binning, gain 100 and 0 deg C.

During processing with Pixinsight I did notice a glow in the area facing the Moon, so I had to work to remove the glow.

M100 is considered a 'grand design intermediate spiral galaxy'... whatever that means. It is one of the largest and brightest in the Virgo group. It is about 55 million light years away.

As you can see, there are several other smaller galaxies. There are several decent galaxies in Coma Berencies, many Messier objects. I really should have imaged them months ago when they were further East. Last night Coma Berenice was already past the meridian when I started imaging.

Roger

M100 Master_DBEdiv_EzDN_PCC_ArcSinH_GAME_HTbg_Curves_EzSR_MLTsharp.jpg
M100 Master_DBEdiv_EzDN_PCC_ArcSinH_GAME_HTbg_Curves_EzSR_MLTsharp.jpg (265.77 KiB) Viewed 271 times
M100 platesolve.jpg
M100 platesolve.jpg (92.26 KiB) Viewed 271 times
Roger M.
Celestron CPC1100 EDGE, Stellarvue 130T refractor dual mounted on iOptron CEM120 on permanent pier mounted in Observatory. Imaging camera ZWO ASI2600 OSC, guide camera Lodestar or ZWO ASI290MM.
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