Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is at a distance of about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth. It is also a Seyfert II galaxy, which means that due to x-rays and unusual emission lines detected, it is suspected that part of the galaxy is falling into a supermassive black hole in the center. NGC 4217 is a possible companion galaxy of Messier 106.

The above text is taken from Wikipedia.

This was an experiment image in the sense that I used the iTelescope service to obtain the luminance data. As you can see the experiment went well and want to give a lot of credits to Pete at iTelescope for helping me sort out some issues. Thus the luminance data is taken at 0.63 arcsec/pixel using a Planewave 17" CDK at F6.8, while the RGB data is taken at 1.23 arcsec/pixel with my 10" ASA AG.

This exercise was a lot of fun and my plans is to revisit iTelescope during summer, when it is too light in Stockholm to do any imaging.

Mouseover of the small thumbnails to the left will show the three different images.

LRGB: Just a plain LRGB combination.

Ha enhanced LRGB: Ha was added to the Red channel by the PS blend mode lighten and by masking of the background (to maintain a neutral background) before construction the LRGB

Annonated Ha enhanced LRGB: Shows the Ha enhanced image with a grid overlay and known objects marked. It was created in PixInsight using the scripts ImageSolver (a plate solve) AnnonateImage (adding the object names and grids).

The following software has been used. MaximDL (image acquisition and guiding), CCDStack (calibration and RGB scaling, PixInsight (cropping, background correction, colour corrections) and Photoshop CS5 (all the rest, incl Noel Carbonis Astronomy Tools).

This image was processed in April 2012