CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: My nemesis from last year- M100

I quickly became obsessed last spring to get a decent photo of this galaxy. I had recently acquired an OAG which permitted me to take 10 min guided exposures. This was my first target to collect over an hour's worth of data, and yet, all I got was this:

As I improved at astrophotography, the opportunity to image this guy waned. I later found out after photographing the above image, I'd taken the pic only a few days after SN2006X appeared. It turns out this galaxy has an interesting story. This supernova in particular, changed many theories of star formation and how supernova work. It also threw into question the validity of the "standard candle" measure of brightness of supernovae used to determine distances to most galaxies, as well the size of the universe as a whole! In particular, SN 2006X had a gamma ray burst of 30 seconds. The energy release in this 30 seconds was greater than all of the energy release of all the stars in M100 combined! And the disturbing fact is had this supernova occurred anywhere in our galaxy, Earth would be sterilized due to the radiation bath. If M100 had any planets with life on it, it doesn't anymore. Yikes.

Going back to my story, May and June rolled around with no luck (plus there was the S-W comet 73P to distract me) and I ran out of time determined to conquer this galaxy the following year (now!). M100 still proves to be an elusive goal. It is supposedly a magnitude 9.3 galaxy but I have an easier time photographing magnitude 12 planetaries!! Maybe it has to do with surface brightness or something. I set up my autoguiding kit to record 5 hours of 7 min exposures at ISO1600, the limit of what I could do with my bad light pollution (using the IDAS-LPS filter) and 2/5 transparency. The results from the first night (11th March) were underwhelming. I could barely make out spiral arms in the subs. I had to throw out 16 exposures, the guidescope lost it's mag 5 star due to the transparency dropping to 1/5. So I spent a second night (20th March) repeating the goal of 5 hours of photography.

Combining two night's data for a total of exactly 100 x 7min exposures (that's 11 hours and 40 minutes folks), I get this. And I'm still not satisfied.

I plan on taking more subs over more nights in the upcoming months to get a good image of this galaxy. Despite having 100 subs I still have a ton of noise. I have this nasty habit of stretching to get maximum detail and bring out all the faint fuzzies at the cost of a noisier image

I wish to get an image of this caliber with my DSLR (despite it being imaged with a 14" scope and cooled CCD).

For those interested, I managed to capture at least 5 uncatalogued galaxies.. entire galaxies with billions of their own stars that are so numerous, dim and small, humans don't even bother to catalog them. Just makes me realize how enormous the universe is....

For the pixel peepers, full frame image is here. An IDAS-LPS front filter was used... without it I can only get ~2min 30sec subs at ISO1600.

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LX200 8" classic, f/10, Meade eq. wedge, .63x FF/FR
Canon 40D (LifePixel clear glass mod) and 5DMkII, unmodified
Canon EF 200/2L IS, 400/5.6L, 100/2.8 Macro, 50/1.4, 85/1.8, 35L, 24L, 17-40L and Peleng 8mm fisheye
Orion Apex 102mm (4") Mak-Cass
Pimped out with accessories and bling
My DSLR Astrophotography Webpage and photo bucket with full equipment list