our space program has made an astonishing discovery. [yes this photo is real]

OPT Telescopes
November 14 at 11:30 AM ·
OPT's staff member Brian Fulda aka @ absorbingphotons with this incredible image.⁠
Messier 101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy⁠
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The Pinwheel Galaxy is located 21 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It has 1 trillion stars and is 170,000 light-years in diameter, about twice the size of the Milky Way.⁠
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This is some data from February that I just recently got around to processing. Soon afterward, my laptop fell off the couch and cracked the screen, so I couldn’t capture new data or edit anything. I had unusually good seeing conditions on this night, which helped bring out the detail in the core of M101.⁠
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Lately, my telescope has been giving me issues with collimation and they’ve been very difficult to correct! I went out to image last month after thinking that I fixed it, only to find my stars were horribly elongated and I had to scrap the whole session. I’m hoping to get the scope back up to full potential, as this session reminded me how great of images it can produce when everything goes right!⁠
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Acquisition Details:⁠
Telescope: Orion 8" f/3.9 Astrograph⁠
Mount: Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro⁠
Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI 071 MC Pro⁠
Coma Corrector: TeleVue Paracorr II⁠
Guiding: ZWO Off-Axis Guider with ASI 120MM-Mini⁠
Polar Alignment: QHY Polemaster⁠
Lights: 26 x 300s = 2h 10m minutes of total exposure⁠
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Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker (via Wine for Mac)⁠
Processed in Adobe Photoshop⁠
Levels, Curves, Camera RAW adjustments⁠
Noise reduction with Topaz Labs DeNoise AI⁠
Final touches in Adobe Lightroom (Texture)⁠