M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: HD122007 · HD122471 · HD122865 · M 101 · NGC 5447 · NGC 5449 · NGC 5450 · NGC 5451 · NGC 5453 · NGC 5455 · NGC 5457 · NGC 5461 · NGC 5462 · NGC 5471 · NGC 5473 · NGC 5474 · NGC 5477 · NGC 5484 · NGC 5485 · PGC 214207 · PGC 214224 · PGC 2447141 · PGC 2448110 · PGC 2449271 · PGC 2449818 · PGC 2451045 · PGC 2451068 · PGC 2452243 · PGC 2452513 · PGC 2452936 · And 70 more.

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

My best M101 yet (by a mile!!)
M101 (Messier #101), also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a face-on spiral galaxy about 21 million lightyears behind the constellation Ursa Major. For how bright and near the galaxy is, it's actually relatively hard to observe visually -- this is mostly due to its large size on the sky, which spreads out the light. That has made it hard to image too! But this time around, I collected a whopping 27 hours of monochrome luminance, red, green, and blue images. Being able to stay set up in my backyard and image every clear night has been a real privilege.

M101 is 170,000 lightyears across, compared to the Milky Way's 100,000, and contains a trillion stars. It has quite a few hydrogen gas clouds (HII regions), which are stellar nurseries. The little galaxy at the top of the image is NGC 5474, which is a peculiar dwarf galaxy (peculiar is a type, not just an adjective!), and one of several companions to M101. As you can see in the image, NGC 5474's disk is not symmetrical, but strongly offset to one side of the core -- this is due to gravitational interactions with M101. It has some spiral structure, which is quite rare in dwarf galaxies.

Broadband under Bortle 7/8/9
Women Astrophotographers

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6006839
PixInsight job	195EMF9H3KRWUB1LUXANWU1QZW8NGUL7
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	14h03m18s.50
RA (top/left)	13h57m08s.15
RA (top/right)	14h09m50s.30
RA (bottom/right)	14h09m40s.26
RA (bottom/left)	13h56m31s.95

Dec (center)	+54°20′53″.4
Dec (top/left)	+53°34′56″.4
Dec (top/right)	+53°39′04″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+55°05′36″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+55°01′24″.9

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

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M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy #7

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