David_Pickles
M74 - Spiral Galaxy
Messier 74 is a face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces. At a distance of about 32 million light-years away from Earth, its low surface brightness makes it the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe. The galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and it is estimated to be home to about 100 billion stars. This is my first attempt at M74, which at Mag 9.8 (according to AstroPlanner) is one of the dimmer objects in the Messier Catalogue. It is the result of 15 x 300s exposures, taken from my garden in Somerset using my QHY8L (with a clear nose piece - no IR cut) and Hutech IDAS P2 LPS filter, attached to my Sky-Watcher Explorer 190MN Pro and mounted on a NEQ6 Pro. Guiding was done with a Starlight XPress Lodestar and PHD. Images were captured using QHY's bundled EZCAP software. Pre-processing and stacking was done in Nebulosity 3, with final processing done in Photoshop CS6.
M74 - Spiral Galaxy
Messier 74 is a face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces. At a distance of about 32 million light-years away from Earth, its low surface brightness makes it the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe. The galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and it is estimated to be home to about 100 billion stars. This is my first attempt at M74, which at Mag 9.8 (according to AstroPlanner) is one of the dimmer objects in the Messier Catalogue. It is the result of 15 x 300s exposures, taken from my garden in Somerset using my QHY8L (with a clear nose piece - no IR cut) and Hutech IDAS P2 LPS filter, attached to my Sky-Watcher Explorer 190MN Pro and mounted on a NEQ6 Pro. Guiding was done with a Starlight XPress Lodestar and PHD. Images were captured using QHY's bundled EZCAP software. Pre-processing and stacking was done in Nebulosity 3, with final processing done in Photoshop CS6.