Here's an image that I took earlier this week, during the record cold snap on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
M101 is called the Pinwheel Galaxy, and presents an awesome sight to us fortunate earthbound observers, since it's oriented face-on from our perspective. It probably takes an incomprehensible amount of time to rotate (it has an estimated diameter of 170,000 light years), but it's still an interesting imagination exercise to consider what it would look like if we could speed up time and watch it spinning. Maybe it really would look like a toy pinwheel!
At about 24 million light years away, the light used to make this short image travelled a very long time before reaching us. Meanwhile, the galaxy has continued to turn.
M101 is an interesting visual observation to make. Its large angular size makes it quite faint but with some patient observing details begin to pop out.
Click here to see a larger version and more details about this image. I want to re-shoot this image under better conditions; with better data, the structure of the outer arms would be improved and some of the numerous faint galaxies in the background would begin to separate themselves from the stars.
Tonight was supposed to be star party night for the TAAA Astrophotography SIG, but due to weather and illnesses, we cancelled it. It's quite cold with high humidity. So no observing tonight.
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