File:255 hour collaboration - Whirlpool Galaxy with Ionized Hydrogen "Shelf" - Flickr - William Ostling.png
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Summary[edit]
| Description |
Processing notes here: theastroenthusiast.com/m51-processing/ The Whirlpool galaxy, also known as Messier 51, is a galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It lies at a distance of roughly 23 million lightyears and spans some 80.000 ly in diameter. M51 is a pretty popular target amongst astrophotographers as it has some very distinctive spiral arms which were first discovered by William Parson in 1845, also making it the first object where spiral arms were detected. Another unique attribute to this galaxy is the tidal stream which shows even at low integration times. The full extent of the tidal stream on the other hand is rarely shown, which is also part of the reason why we started this project, in the end, we were able to reveal even the faintest parts of it. These streams are a result of the tidal interaction between M51a (the big one) and M51b (the small one). So in fact M51 can be considered as two galaxies rather than one. As this tidal interaction makes M51 so interesting, the galaxies have been studied excessively to better understand what’s happening between two merging galaxies. However, it wasn’t until 2018 that A. Watkins et al. discovered a large ionised gas cloud north of the galaxy system, which is one of the things we focused on for this collaboration. You can spot this recently discovered ionised gas cloud in our image on the right hand side - it was revealed using 118h 39mn of integration time in the Ha wavelength and was quite the challenge to reveal, but more on that later. In order to reveal both the entirety of the tidal streams and the Ha cliff formation, we knew we had to gather lots of data. After our big project on the galaxy pair M81/82, our team wanted to keep the cooperation going - together we decided that M51 will be our next target. As some people weren’t able to contribute this time, new ones joined in and our group for M51 now consists of 16 people: 1 Editor and 15 photographers. As we want to keep this going in the long term, we also decided to get a team name - The Deep sky collective. By mid-July, after rejecting bad frames, we were left with 254h 51m 30 s total (or ~10.6 days); this also marks the longest integration time ever on M51 from any group of amateurs Website: theastroenthusiast.com/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/the_astronomy_enthusiast/ |
| Date | Taken on 8 August 2023, 12:28 |
| Source | 255 hour collaboration - Whirlpool Galaxy with Ionized Hydrogen "Shelf" |
| Author | William Ostling |
| Flickr tags | astronomy, astrophotography, space, night, sky, telescope, apod, gas, h-alpha, dust, stars, live, telescopelive, image, color, bright, ngc, detail, nebula, hubble, broadband, rgb, emission, rainbow, spira, astrophotograpy, nasa, galaxy, spiral, star, whirlpool |
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by William Ostling at https://flickr.com/photos/192935202@N08/53102830146. It was reviewed on 15 August 2023 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0. |
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| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
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| current | 02:33, 15 August 2023 | | 1,893 × 1,427 (2.61 MB) | Red panda bot (talk | contribs) | In Flickr Explore: 2023-08-09 |
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