"And God said..."

On Sunday, December 14th, I captured an image of Messier 81 (M81), which is also known as Bode's Nebula. M81 is not a nebula, but is in fact a barred spiral galaxy. Bode's Nebula was catalogued as a nebula by early astronomer Charles Messier. At the time, there was a misconception that there was only one galaxy: The Milky Way. In 1924, Edwin Hubble was the first to prove that some of these faint objects, which were classified as nebulae, were in fact "island universes" (th

It has been some time since my last image. After fighting against the smoke from the Canadian wildfires, clouds, rain, and high humidity, I finally managed to capture a whole 14 hours on the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). I was able to add roughly 2.5 hours of integration time (from Bortle 4 skies) for my broadband data, and 7 hours of data for the H-alpha regions (across varying phases of the moon). H-Alpha Regions What are H-Alpha regions? H-Alpha (or Hydrogen Alpha) regions are c

Location The Pinwheel Galaxy (not to be confused with the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy) is formally designated as M101. This galaxy is located in the constellation Ursa Major, and the asterism Big Dipper. It is down and to the left of Alkaid, the bottommost star of the Big Dipper. The Pinwheel Galaxy is located roughly 23 million light years away and is about 170,000 light years in diameter (that is nearly twice as large as our Milky Way!). It appears relatively small and has a