It’s been already four years when I imaged M106 galaxy for the first time, however not much changed in this area. Then it was made with 6 inches newtonian and tiny but sensitive sensor of Atik 314L+. This time I used 130mm refractor and 4/3 format CMOS cameras. I collected frames to the image below in March, 2017, but it took some time to start processing them. So eventually after three months I have made it. Luminance is 100×3 minutes frames gathered with QHY163M mono camera, and color is 20×3 minutes with QHY163C color camera. Conditions were not bad, both seeing and transparency were good, though not very good. There are plenty of other smaller and very small galaxies in the frame – you may click a link below to full size inverted mono image, so you will be able to chase many of them.
M106 galaxy is located in Canes Venatici constellation near to Great Bear eastern leg. Although it is denominated as M106 it was not included in original catalog that Charles Messier created. Together with M105 and M107 it was added there by Helen Sawyer Hogg in 1947. M106 is about 24 million light years away and it is a Seyfert galaxy – active galaxy with relatively bright core. They also contains supermassive black holes in the centre, the one in M106 is estimated to be 40 million times more massive than Sun.
Large version here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-03-26-M106-2.jpg
Full mono version here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-03-26-M106-mono.jpg
Clear skies!
