I finally got in a few nights of astrophotography. It is not looking good for more, so I thought I would go ahead and post these. I really like doing galaxies, they are so mysterious and distant, but enormous beyond our imagination. I am sure that somewhere in every galaxy there is intelligent life, but the distances are so great we will never know.
NGC 2903. This field galaxy is located about 30 million light-years away from the Milky Way and is a member of the Virgo Supercluster. A dwarf galaxy is visible below NGC 2903 and the two galaxies are interacting. From Wikipedia: It was discovered by German-born astronomer William Herschel, who cataloged it on November 16, 1784. He mistook it as a double nebula, as did subsequent observers, and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the Third Earl of Rosse resolved into a spiral form.M61, another of Charles Messiers “not a comet” objects. From Wikipedia: M61 was first discovered by Barnaba Oriani on May 5, 1779, six days before Charles Messier discovered the same galaxy. Messier had observed it on the same night as Oriani but had mistaken it for a comet. Its distance has been estimated to be 45.61 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy.This is the Helix Galaxy, NGC 2685. It is about 50,000 light-years across and about 42 million light-years away from Earth. From our perspective, it is very small, faint and difficult to image. But I thought I would try it just to see what it looked like since it is a polar-ring galaxy. It is an object of great scientific interest, because polar-ring galaxies are very rare galaxies. They are thought to form when two galaxies gravitationally interact with each other. In my image, the polar ring is apparent.
