M101 from the Winter Star Party 2026!

Last week at the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, I captured this image of M101 – The Pinwheel Galaxy.

This was my first year attending, and I can already say I’ll be back.

I made the trip down with my AAPOD2.com partner, Jason, and we had an incredible week — clear skies almost every night and surprisingly cool temperatures. About 310 people attended this year. I met some great new friends and got to reconnect with a few dear old ones too. That’s always one of the best parts of events like this.

M101 is a grand-design spiral galaxy located in Ursa Major, about 21 million light-years away. It’s nearly face-on from our perspective, which makes those sweeping spiral arms really stand out. The pink HII regions scattered throughout the arms are massive star-forming regions where new stars are being born. M101 has also hosted an unusually high number of recorded supernovae over the past century.

This is a HaLRGB image with about 10 hours of total integration. Captured with my CarbonStar 6" Newtonian with a reducer at f/3.8, which presented some challenges when blending the Ha into the LRGB data. Fast systems gather signal quickly, but they demand careful star control and disciplined processing.

I processed the entire image exclusively in PixInsight.

I still have two more targets from the trip to process — the Double Cluster and Markarian’s Chain — so more to come.

Clear skies.