Last night has clear but hazy and full Moon rose at about 9PM. I decided to try and image M91 anyway. Coma Berenices is only a few minutes from the meridian when I started imaging, so it was around 90 deg from the Moon. That limited the time I could image M91, but it was far enough away from the Moon to be not be overly effected. Of course the sky was very bright. I only have a couple of more weeks before Coma Berenices is to far West to image.
As it runs out, I was able to image 2 galaxies (M91 and NGC 4571) in the same frame.
I was able to capture 129 images (2 minutes, binned 1x1, -10C, gain 100) with ZWO ASI2600 OSC attached to 11 inch SCT. I used SV90 refractor and ZWO ASI290 for autoguiding using PHD2. Guiding was good all night averaging around .65 arc-sec RMS.
Processing was done using PixInsight using only my standard set of processes.
M91 was one of Charles Messier's original discoveries. On March 18, Messier found it, along with seven other galaxies in the Virgo Cluster – M84, M85, M86, M87, M88, M89 and M90 – and the globular cluster M92. What a night !!!!
Messier 91 is classified as an anemic galaxy, which is to say, it is a spiral galaxy with very little gas and a low rate of star formation compared to similar galaxies. M91 is home to about 400 billion stars.
Roger
- M91_plate.jpg (1.23 MiB) Viewed 6003 times
- M91.jpg (1.71 MiB) Viewed 6003 times