• The Mirror Galaxy in Coma Berenices
    • M100
    M100
  • NGC 4321, or M100, is sometimes called the Mirror Galaxy.  It
  • is a beautiful grand design spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices
  • that contains 400 billion stars located 55 Mly from us.
  • Hover over the picture for an annotated version
  • Date:  2 May 2024
  • FOV:  approximately 30' × 20'; the angular size of M100 is about 7.4'
  • Telescope:  Orion 180mm Mak-Cass (2509mm, f/14, nominally 2700mm, f/15)
  • Guiding:  ZWO ASI120MM mini mono guide camera,
  • Stellarvue F050G 50mm guide scope
  • Computer:  ASIair pro Raspberry Pi
  • Mount:  iOptron CEM40
  • Camera:  ZWO ASI071MC Pro Cooled (-10°C) Color CMOS gain 90
  • Pixel size:  4.78 μm
  • Resolution:  0.393 arcsec/pixel
  • Filter:  none
  • Stacking:  fifty-one 240 second frames using Pixinsight
  • Total Time:  3 hours 24 minutes
  • Processing:  Pixinsight – SPPC, DBE, SPCC, BlurXT, NoiseXT, DynCrop → Linear
  • MStr, GHS, HST, PMath MStr + GHS + HST → Stars, Sat,
  • StarXT, MStr, GHS, HST, PMath MStr + GHS + HST → Starless,
  • HDR8464PhLm, Sat, PMath ~(~Stars*~Starless) → Blend, scale
  • Location:  Darling Hill Observatory near Vesper, NY