SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Jon Greif
Location of Photo:
Texas Star Party, Ft. Davis, TX, USA
Date/Time of photo:
April 22-24, 2025, between 9 pm and 3 am MDT
Equipment:
SeeStar S50 Smart Scope and Pixinsight Processing
Description:
Two nights of exposures with the small SeeStar S50 telescope at this wonderful, very dark site, resulted in over 2000 subframes and this image of the Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101 or M101), a face-on, counterclockwise Intermediate spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781 and was communicated that year to Charles Messier, who verified its position for inclusion in the Messier Catalogue as one of its final entries. M101 is a large galaxy, with a diameter of 252,000 light-years. By comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of 87,400 light-years. M101 has around a trillion stars and a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses.
