M101, The Pinwheel Galaxy

Is described here in Wikipedia.

M101 is a nice face on spiral galaxy about 21 million light years away in Ursa Major. Supernova SN2011fe exploded in the galaxy on August 24th 2011, I have an image of that in the 2011/2012 Season gallery.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 9 frames of 5 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software. This was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack them into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.