Messier 101, or the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a face on, unbarred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Ursa Major. It is a very irregular galaxy with a morphological type of SAB(rs)cd.   It was discovered in 1781 and included in the Messier Catalog as one of the last entries in the same year. M101 was one of the first targets I shot with a canon dslr and a 500mm telephoto lens on a star tracker when I first started my astrophotography journey. The result was... not great. I knew then that I would need to wait and retry the target with a better setup. I have since moved to a 6" Celestron C6-N Newtonian that I've upgraded for imaging. With the gear upgrade, I knew I wanted to try galaxy imaging again. Unfortunately, the area I live in isn't great for weather. We usually have nice imaging weather around the full moon (go figure). So for this target I just started with Ha imaging and decided to "see where it went", weather depending. In total I got ~85hrs of data with ~50 of those hours being in Ha. The rest was split between the LRGB filters.

Data capture was done in NINA and processing was done in PixInsight