M51


A Home Galaxy

It’s fun to imagine that distant worlds might be home to other sentient beings, who stare up at their night sky to see the Milky Way Galaxy (although, even translated to their language, that would be a very odd name for it).  Perhaps there is some such world or worlds in the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51 or NGC5194.  But in this case, “home galaxy” means that I captured this image of M51 from my home observatory, which is unusual because 99% of the images I capture from here are narrowband images of emission nebulae.  And I was surprised […]


One More From Last Weekend

This is M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which I last shot 4 years ago.  It’s fairly small, so it’s difficult to get a sharp image, and I don’t often try.  The above version is cropped to less than half the full frame, and the galaxy is still a small portion of the area.  Below is the (almost) whole image: It looks a bit sharper this way, and you get to see at least one more galaxy in the lower left corner. This image was put together from about 2 hours of luminence data and 2 hours of RGB data.  As with […]