m101-the-pinwheel-galaxy-mqek78p8M101

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A face-on grand-design spiral in Ursa Major, roughly 21 million light-years away. M101's arms unwind from a bright core in nearly perfect symmetry — star-forming H II regions stipple the disk, and the wider field picks up a few satellite galaxies and faint background fuzz.
Captured from the backyard in broadband: no narrowband blend, just the natural color of ancient starlight stacked into one frame.
Every photon in this image began its journey when M101 was already as it appears tonight — a mature spiral — but Earth was a different planet.
At a distance of about 21 million light-years, the light that reached my camera in left M101 around , deep in the . On Earth at that moment:
Folders
File types
Gear
3 items
ZWO ASI2600MC Air
ZWO AM5
William Optics RedCat 51

The galaxy in the frame is a time capsule. The backyard, the mount, and the sensor are the receiving end of a message that has been in transit since before the Grand Canyon finished cutting downward.
A few facts from the M 101 integration set behind this image:
If you're counting photons: each 50 MB frame is a small brick in a very large wall of light that crossed intergalactic space for longer than hominins have existed.