April 30, 2022
M106
Messier 106 (M106, NGC 425) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. It’s about 22 to 25 million light years from Earth. It was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain. M106 is about 135,000 light years in diameter.
I imaged this over two nights at the end of March and the beginning of April using my new Explore Scientific ED 127. This is the first deep space object that I have attempted to image at the telescope’s native focal length of 952mm. This was challenging for me and really pushed my telescope mount to its limits. This is also my first time using Pixinsight. I only used Pixinsight for preprocessing and image integration, which I probably attempted a dozen times before getting it right.
I used subframe selection on debayered color channels to select frames for integration. As a result, each color channel ended up with a different number of subframes integrated.
228x120” Blue frames (7.6h)
253x120” Green frames (8.4h)
263x120” Red frames (8.7h)