My second attempt to capture M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy. From my location, due to trees behind my house, M51 isn't visible until nearly midnight, so I only got an hour total exposure time (been staying up too late this past week, and I would have had to stay up past 2 am to babysit the meridian flip!).
M51 is 30 million light years away. Although it was catalogued by Charles Messier in 1773 as a "fuzzy nebula", it wasn't until 1845 that William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, was able to see and record it's unique spiral structure. His
drawing of the spiral nebula, based on his observations through a 1.8m reflecting telescope he built, is believed to have been the inspiration for Van Gogh's "Starry Night". However, it wasn't until the 1920s that astronomers began to understand that these spiral nebulas were actually distant galaxies containing billions of stars.
In addition to being interesting because of it's apparent brightness to observers on Earth, M51 is impressive because we happen to be able to see the full galactic disk from an almost perfect perspective. We can clearly see the effects of gravitational interaction with it's close companion galaxy NGC 5195.
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