Practice sure does make perfect, as Benjamin Law found out shooting the Pinwheel Galaxy. His exceptional effort won him the Photo of the Week prize for the week of January 31, 2020.
The Pinwheel Galaxy, M101, is a spiral galaxy about 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. At 170,000 light-years across, it is nearly twice the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
“I have tried many times with this galaxy, and this time I am using a new processing technique to make it more crispy and colourful,” he wrote. “It wasn’t that easy to get enough photos from this relatively dim galaxy using a f/10 system, but with enough exposure time more details can be revealed.”
Law said he used an EDGE8 telescope and an ASI 294MC-Pro. He used an UV/IR filter, and total integration was 14 hours (from January 2020, April 2019 and December 2018). The gain was 300, and he processed the image in PixInsight and Photoshop.
