Observations of M101
These are the observations available for M101. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.
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Supernova SN2023ixf in Messier 101
Finally, the clouds over East Anglia are breaking and revealing not one but two supernovae in familiar galaxies. A faint supernova in NGC4568 is now low on my southwestern horizon, and we also have the bright SN2023ixf in M101. The latest measurements on rochesterastronomy.org put the magnitude at 11.0. It is now so bright that only a 30s exposure produces an image which is not saturated, a 60s exposure, for example, is saturated.
I suspect many will have a go at M101 despite the lack of astronomical darkness. I captured the attached image on the 22nd and 23rd of May. The supernova is the bright star in the lower-right spiral arm at the eight o'clock location, close to the HII region NGC 5461. Unlike other stars in the image which are in our own galaxy and a few thousand light-years away, the supernova is 21 million light-years away.
This image of supernova SN2023ixf in Messier 101 is by David Davies and taken from Cambridge in the UK. To see more of David's work please visit his Flickr Photostream. A larger version of this image is available here. Image Details
Data: 35 x 120s RGB subframes.
- Telescope: 250mm Ritchey-Chretien with 0.7x reducer (1450mm focal length)
- Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro
- Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.
- Acquisition: NINA, GSS, PHD2
- Image Processing: Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight, Gaia Spectro-photometric Color Calibration using custom filters for the 294 camera, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, Photoshop
David Davies - (23 May 2023).
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June's Galaxy of the Month: M101
This is a image of M101 with data captured over the 13th, 16th and 20th of March 2018 for a total of 4h10m (25x600s) of luminance and 20m (2x600s) each of Red, Green and Blue.
I used an Altair Astro GSO 10" F8 scope with a Starlight Xpress H694 camera and Astronomik filters from Mileaway Observatory in East Sussex.
M101 by Paul Whitmarsh from his Mileaway Observatory in East Sussex. Paul Whitmarsh - 5 June 2018
