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.

Ring Nebula

M57 / NGC 6720

Dora’s favorite planetary nebula imaged on the night of the summer solstice. In the middle is a (now) white dwarf. It is actually 200x as bright as the Sun, but is 2,400 light-years away. This nebula is tiny (when viewed from Earth), just 1.5 by 1 arcminutes. It only started the expansion 200-600 years ago!

M13

NGC 6205

The M13 globular cluster is one of the largest and brightest in the Milky Way. This ancient, 11.6 billion years old cluster is made up of 100,000 stars and thousands are visible in this picture. It is located 22,200 light-years away from Earth.

M3

NGC 5272

The M3 globular cluster is one of the largest and brightest in the Milky Way. This ancient, 11.4 billion years old cluster is made up of half a million stars and thousands are visible in this picture. It is located 32,600 light-years away from Earth and is quite isolated from the rest of our galaxy because it is ~40° above the galactic plane.

Orion Nebula

M42, M43 and The Running Man Nebula

A spiral galaxy like our Milky Way contains a diffuse interstellar medium of gas, dust, and trace amounts of heavier elements produced by old, dying stars. Sometimes these clouds collapse under their own weight, triggering star formation. In Orion there are about 700 stars in different stages of formation.

Beehive Cluster

M44 / NGC 2632 / Cr 189

The Beehive Cluster is one of nearest open star clusters to Earth. Along with many main sequence stars it contains red giants and white dwarfs (which are much older stars). They are about 560 light-years away from Earth and on avarage 600 million years old.