This is the Pinwheel Galaxy, or at least how it looked around 21 million years ago, captured in 2015. Aside from being a beautiful example of a spiral galaxy, Pinwheel was also made famous by being the subject of one of the most detailed images that the Hubble Space Telescope ever produced. What I love about this image is all those glowing red and blue regions in the spiral arms. Those are intensely active star forming regions that would be full of the most amazing nebula unlike anything we could imagine. Oh to whisk our way through those dust lanes!
Captured in 2015 using an AT8RC telescope and QSI683WSG camera on top of an Atlas EQ-G mount helped along by a Lodestar X2 guide camera. Light was graciously filtered by Astrodon RGB filters. Orchestrated by Sequence Generator Pro, guided by OpenPHD2 and processed in PixInsight, the data for this image comprised:
View more info about this image on its Astrobin page and read more about the Pinwheel Galaxy on wikipedia.
