Last night Trish was at the helm. All Mike did was take the dust covers off.
M61, a beautiful face-on grand design spiral galaxy between the arms of Virgo, with a type II supernova.
FLI PL16803 camera on 20" PlaneWave on ageing and sticky MI-750 fork mount. Astrodon filters. Luminance 8hrsin 30 min subs. RGB 2 h10m in mostly 15 min subs. Field approx 42 min arc, north up. All scope control robotics, firmware, and image processing software designed and built by us.
The supernova is the brilliant blue star within the confines of the galaxy. It is about 60% of the way toward 2 o'clock edge of the galaxy.
In the raw stack, the SNR is blue-white, as befits something very hot. Mike went to some lengths in processing to preserve the blue: because the strong arcsinh stretch tends to desaturate the brights, leaving a pallid white supernova, we very carefully got the black point and then colour balance right and then resaturated the brights only.
Trish then applied some vigorous and forthright wavelet sharpening to the three main galaxies in the image.
THE FULL FRAME IS HERE where there are other galaxies to be seen, many showing form, as the police would say.
Contrary to expectations, the supernova is not really bang on a spiral arm, but almost in the void between spiral arms. Arrest that supernova! It's breaching lock-down!
Edit: We previously used the 15 minute colour data as additional luminance. We've since shot completely fresh luminance data, dropped a couple subs taken with the galaxy low in the sky, and we're up to 8 hours total luminance. The image is a bit sharper and deeper.
Cheers from the farm (where current livestock consists only of Colonel Mustard the rooster, and the three Spice Girls, Ginger, Pepper, and Anise)
MnT