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Messier 101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy

Messier 101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy + SN

Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello

 

RA 14h 03m 12.6s DEC+54° 20′ 57″

Messier 101 (NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy at 21 million light-years (6 Mpc) in Ursa Major discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781.

M101, with a diameter of 170,000 light-years, is comparable in size with the Milky Way. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small central bulge of about 3 billion solar masses.

 

SN 2023ixf, the bright supernova that exploded in an arm of M101

taken on May 27, 2023 at 20:55 UTC

 

This is a very zoomed-in crop of the stack of just 10 subframes of 30 seconds at ISO 3200 300mm telephoto, uncalibrated.

The supernova, clearly visible in every single frame, exhibits an unusual cyan color in my images, in stark contrast to the yellow bulge of the galaxy.

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Uploaded on May 25, 2021
Taken on June 11, 2025