I imaged this galaxy from my back garden in 2023 using my one shot colour camera and my LExtreme light pollution pollution filter. It is M51a and 51b. My image also appeared on BBC Sky at Night magazine's Instagram page.
Total Integration time: 6hours 35 min
Moon coverage: 50%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
The Whirlpool galaxy or Messier 51a:
The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. It is 7.22 megaparsecs away and 23.58 kiloparsecs in diameter. Source Wikipedia
This was actually a failry tricky target to process to be fair. I used my telescope and astonomy camera to image this wonderful example of this galaxy. The faint gray 'stuff' you see around this galaxy is what is called IFN or integrated flux nebula and is light being reflected from the surrounding galaxy and the Milkyway.
M51 was discovered by Charles Messier in 1773. M51 is located 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 8.4 and can be spotted with a small telescope most easily during May. The Whirlpool Galaxy’s beautiful face-on view and closeness to Earth allow amateur astronomers to study a classic spiral galaxy’s structure and star-forming processes.
This was maybe the fifth Messier object I imaged in the summer months of 2023, I think I managed to get around Messier 10 objects that time. The summer nights were particularly warm with ambient temps around 15 or 16 deg which is actually pretty warm for Scotland, but I soldiered on non-the-less, with my cooled astronomy camera, to try and get more objects from the messier catalogue, of whcih there are 110. See here for the full list.
I hope you enjoy seeing these images.
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