Discovered by Pierre Méchain, the Pinwheel Galaxy was one of the final entries in the Messier catalogue at 101. Pierre Tremblay’s image of the astronomical object sure wasn’t last on the list, taking top honours as the SkyNews Photo of the Week May 15, 2020.
Tremblay said he took the image April 20, 2020, at his remote observatory in Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire, Quebec under a Class 3 sky.
He said he used his Takahashi FS-102 (845 mm) F8 scope with Takahashi flattener 1.04x and robofocus. The camera was a QSI-583 WSG, and he used a Meade DSI pro as guide camera. For filters, he used Astrodon E-series first generation colour filters and an Astrodon h-alpha 5nm filter. The mount was a Losmandy G-11 Gemini 1 level 4, with a Ovision gear upgrade.
For processing, he used MaximDL, ImagesPlus, Registar and Photoshop.
He took 4 exposures of 350 seconds each for red binned 2, 3 exposures at 300 seconds for green binned 2, and 3 exposures at 300 seconds each for Blue binned 2, and 6 exposures at 1,200 seconds each binned 1 for Luminance, to built a LLRGB composite.
The honourable mention this week goes to Trudy Almon for her image of the sunrise at Forbes Beach looking toward Split Rock in New Brunswick.
The image took know-how and timing to capture, and one judge noted that it is “simply a lovely image, evoking tranquility.”
“Every now and then the sunrise lines up with the split and the tides are such that I can get into the right spot to get a photo,” she wrote.
She said she took the sunrise photo May 8 at 7:45 a.m. using a Canon T4i with an 18mm set to f/11. Exposure time was 1/125 second.
