M101 - The Pinwheel Mosaic

Introduction

See the report on how the project went on Daniel Duggan's Blog.

On Tuesday 8th May, the FT Team ran a themed observing day for which the whole observing night was dedicated to obtaining images for a mosaic of M101.

Users, signed up to reserved sessions of their choice and were given different co-ordinates to observe with the telescope. Each school was given three different areas of the galaxy to observe and were able to make their own mini-mosaic; then at the end of the night, all the data was collected to form a complete mosaic.

All the data that was collected that night is available on this * Data Page * and you can use these instructions for The GIMP to make your own mosaic using the images.

Here is the final mosaic that was produced (click for a larger version):

Why a Mosaic?

This galaxy extends about 22 arc minutes across the sky, and since the field of view of the Faulkes Telescopes are only 4.5 arc minutes - only the central region is ever seen.

Below is an example of an image from Faulkes, and one from the Hubble Space Telescope.

M101 from Hubble	M101 from FTN

Object Info

M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy is a large spiral in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781 and was one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s catalogue.

You can find out more about M101 here.

Participating Schools