Messier 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 15 million light-years away in the constellation borders of Hydra and Centaurus.
It is one of the absolute classics of the southern sky, and rightly so. The multitude of details in the spiral arms is fascinating. Extensive, arc-shaped stellar streams can be seen to the north and south of the galaxy disk. Due to the depth of the image, the faint outer regions of the galaxy are also depicted, which increases its diameter to around 21', whereas the literature usually states around 14'.
In May 2023, Oliver Schneider, Faried Abu-Salih and I put our remote observatory on the Rooisand Desert Ranch, Namibia, into operation and work there together as "DSI (Deep Sky Imaging) Team". The observatory is working well and provides us with a very large amount of raw data - the weather at home now invites us to process it.
Comments