[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Going Deep from the WLDSP...

[Matt Schricker]

I can’t tell you how happy I am that you enjoyed the shot Mike.

Thank you for digging into it!

On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 12:12 PM Mike McCabe <cartech2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> ...which stands for *W*eymouth *L*anding* D*ark *S*ky* P*reserve.
>
> Of course I joke about that, but Matt and Jim have to make the best of
> their situations, which they consistently do. Matt recently shared his
> latest rendition of M51, the Whirlpool galaxy in Canes Venatici. While Matt
> himself indicated that he wasn't especially impressed with the result, I
> believe that when everything is taken into consideration it really came out
> remarkable.
>
> It wasn't all that long ago that astrophotographers working from even dark
> sky locations struggled to get the apparent 'bridge' between M51 and NGC
> 5195, which by the way is an optical illusion. What we're really seeing
> there is the distorted arm of M51 overlaid on NGC 5195, which lies well
> behind the bigger galaxy. It is thought that a long-ago gravitation
> interaction between the two celestial bodies 'stretched' the arm of M51 in
> the way that we see it now, but that they are not currently physically
> connected.
>
> But get the bridge Matt did, and a whole host of other details as well. In
> taking a close look at his image, there are at least a half-dozen galaxies
> in there, with two 'extras' being quite prominent even at nearly 16th
> magnitude.
>
> [image: Inline image]
>
> While the main protagonists of course are the Whirlpool itself and its
> interacting dwarf neighbor, IC's 4277 and 4278 are easily discerned - even
> at distances of many hundreds of light years away!
>
> The distance to IC 4278 is well known at ~230 million light years, but
> 4277 is less well studied. With some web-sleuthing I was able to come
> across one calculation that estimated it to be nearly 600 million light
> years distant. That's some OLD light collecting on that there camera
> sensor!
>
> File Under: *What Bored Astronomers Do When It's Forever Cloudy*
>
> Mike M.
>
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