I imaged this huge galaxy from my back garden on the west coast of Scotland. It is more commonly called The Pinwheel Galaxy. The Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as M101, is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain, a colleague of Charles Messier in 1781.
Total Integration time: 6 hours 15 mins
Moon coverage: 1%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
The galaxy is approximately 25 million light-years from Earth and spiral arms are filled with star-forming nebulae and young, hot, blue stars. The Pinwheel galaxy can be seen with a small telescope, and is best viewed in June, which is when I took this image.
The galaxy has been the site of several notable events, including a type II supernova in 2011 and a luminous red nova in 2015 as well as the supernova discovered in 2023 by a Japanese astronomer. See below.
Here are some more details about the Pinwheel Galaxy: It has a mean radius of 85,000 light-years and it has a magnitude of 7.9 so it is is fairly dim and not possible to see with the naked eye.
It fills a region in the sky that's one-fifth the size of the full moon.
The Pinwheel Galaxy:
I took this image of this huge galaxy in June 2023 using my astronomy equipment.
This galaxy is famous due to a star that went supernova. The closest supernova to Earth in five years was discovered in the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101, on 19 May 2023 by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki. See my image below for the exploding star.
The actual explosion lasted a few weeks or so but I was one of the lucky ones who managed to capture it in an image.
Copy below from BBC Sky at Night magazine:
Spectral analysis indicates the explosion was a Type II supernova.
These are catastrophic explosions that occur when a massive star with a mass between eight and 40 times that of the Sun no longer has enough fuel to support itself against gravity and collapses to form a neutron star or a black hole.
The close proximity of SN2023ixf gives a unique opportunity to study these stellar explosions.
The supernova occured in the southwest region of M101, close to prominent star-forming region NGC 5461. Previous studies of this area found it contained three clusters of young stars, which are common places to find the supergiant stars that eventually go supernova.
A 15-solar-mass red supergiant identified in Spitzer Space Telescope images of M101 taken between 2012 and 2019 could potentially be the origin of the supernova, although this star didn’t exhibit the typical fluctuations seen in a pre-explosion star.
Further analysis will be required to establish if it is actually connected to the supernova.
Hope you enjoyed reading this post about the Pinwheel galaxy.
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