Derby and District Astronomical Society



Messier 101 (NGC 5457)
The Pinwheel Galaxy

Spiral Galaxy in Ursa Major
RA 14h 03m 12s  Dec +54° 21' 00"

[Messier Index]



John Hill captured this cropped image of M101 on the 6th April 2025. The exposures were 300 x 60 seconds with an Optolong L-eXtreme filter, giving a total exposure of 5 hours. A Skywatcher Esprit 100ED refractor and 294MC Pro camera (at -10C and gain 120) mounted on a HEQ5Pro with a ZWO ASIair Pro were used. The images were processed using Pixinsight and GIMP.  Image Credit: John Hill.




This image of M101, including the dwarf spiral galaxy NGC 5474 at 2 o'clock and the lenticular galaxy NGC 5422 at 8 o'clock, was created by Chris Callaway using data collected during April 2024 and March 2025. Chris used a Takahashi 106 telescope, Altair 26C one shot colour camera and a Paramount MyT mount. The image comprises 7.5 hours of data in 2 and 3 minute subs. Processing was in Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight and Photoshop. A cropped version of the image, zoomed in on M101, is also provided.  Image Credit: Chris Callaway.






The following image of M101 was captured by Steve Chambers on the 25th July 2023. Steve used a DWARF II Smart Telescope, stacking 81 x 10s exposures on the camera. No filter was used, and darks were auto-generated on the camera. No post processing has been applied. The second image is a close-up of the first.   Image Credit: Steve Chambers.





Chris Newsome and Adrian Brown produced the following image of spiral galaxy M101 (visible in the upper left portion of the image) on the night of the 3rd March 2006. The galaxy NGC 5474 is visible to the lower right of the image and just below M101 is the very faint NGC 5477. The image was taken using using a Canon EOS 300D camera with a 2" Astronomik CLS filter at the prime focus of an 80-ED refractor. This set up was guided with a Borg refractor and ATK1C camera on a CGE mount. One 10 minute exposure and three 15 minute exposures were taken at 400 ASA. The images were calibrated in Maxim DL and then in CS2. The stacked image was cropped and processed using GradientXTerminator, RGB levels, curves and a Gaussian blur. The image was further adjusted by using the Reduce Noise and Despeckle filter in CS2. The TIFF image was then converted to JPEG format.   Image Credit: Chris Newsome.


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