Messier 101 – Pinwheel Galaxy

Messier 101, M101 for short or NGC 5457 is also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy

Fun Facts

• Distance from Earth – 21 million light-years
• Location – Ursa Major
• What is it – Face on spiral galaxy
• Discovered by Pierre Mechain 1781

The image above is made up of 5, 5-minute exposures. On the night I took a lot more but clouds moved in and spoiled the other 15. In fact, I had to remove some of the clouds from the original images to form the picture above.

This was taken with a field flattener so the stars look a little better, but I had to remove the blue halos with photoshop.