Pinwheel Galaxy

M101 / NGC 5457 / SN 2023ixf

Altough our images often (though unintentionally) feature small extremely far & faint galaxies, M101 is the furthest away target that we have choosen so far. It is a whooping 21 million light-years away! Something to think about: if M101 was bright enough for the naked eye to see, it would look almost exactly the same size as the full Moon; it is however 517,383,697,916,666x further away than the Moon; so, how big is it??

Triangulum

M33 / NGC 598

Triangulum is the smallest spiral galaxy in the Local Group (us, Andromeda, the Magellanic Clouds and a few more neighbours). It is thought to be satellite galaxy of Andromeda as they are moving towards us together. In 4 billion years all three galaxies might merge into one big elliptical galaxy!

Andromeda Galaxy

M31 / NGC 224

The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest neighboring galaxy, a mere 2.5 million light-years away. It is the only galaxy visible to the naked eye - but just barely. The galaxy is made up of around 1 trillion stars.

Bode's Galaxy & Cigar Galaxy

M81 & M82 / NGC 3031

Bode’s Galaxy is a grand design spiral galaxy which means it has prominent and well-defined spiral arms. It is about 12 million light-years away, and is 90,000 light-years across. Its nucleus is a supermassive black hole, with a mass 70 million times that of our Sun.

The Eyes

NGC 4435 & NGC 4438 / Arp 120 and asteroids!

NGC 4435 is a barred lenticular galaxy currently colliding with NGC 4438. Both are about 52 million light-years away. There are 3 interesting trails visible in the image below. These belong to a minor planet and two asteroids. Can you find them? Only a handful of people have ever seen any of these objects!