The Pinwheel Galaxy (NGC 5457, also known as Messier 101) appears in this dataset as a composite of 582 exposures totaling 29.1 hours of integration time. Data collection spanned from April 26 to May 22, 2026, using an Askar 71F telescope paired with a ZWO ASI 533MC Pro camera on an AM3 mount. The imaging sequence included 318 frames through an Optolong L-Extreme HA-OIII 7nm narrowband filter and 264 frames through an Optolong L-Quad Enhance filter, all at 180-second exposures. This face-on spiral galaxy in Ursa Major, located approximately 21 million light-years from Earth, presents prominent spiral arms and numerous star-forming regions that benefit from dual-filter narrowband imaging. The dataset is available as a free download under CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing, permitting copy, modification and redistribution for non-commercial purposes.
Generated from the dataset's metadata; the author's description above is authoritative.