M51: A Feast for the Eyes | Hacker News Reader

M51: A Feast for the Eyes

esawebb.org

182 pointsughitsaaron32 comments

I love this one! The Webb telescope is so impressive.

M51 is interesting because it is interacting/merging with another galaxy. Here is my attempt at capturing M51 this summer from my backyard using my amateur setup:

https://www.astrobin.com/3qbwu2/

And my setup if you are interested:

https://www.astrobin.com/y1x1n2/

Amazing! Thank you for sharing.

My wife and I are moving from a Bortle 9 (NYC) to a Bortle 3-4 (Upstate) soon and I'm excited to start attempting more DSO imaging. Up to now I've been mostly focused on capturing Jupiter and Saturn which are, honestly, challenging as it is.

Jupiter and Saturn are fun and completely different techniques (eg lucky imaging and de-rotation) compared to DSO (lots and lots of patience.)

I am in a bottle 5-6 zone, right on the edge of a major city.

Lots of us astronomy nerds here!

I also captured galaxy back in 2022: https://www.jeromehollon.com/astro/2022-04-22-m51/

Very cool! The extra context is appreciated - seeing the two galactic neighbors , their proximity and relative sizes. In fact, these articles would be that much more meaningful to me if they included different resolutions and views of the same look direction. Seeing something for the first time at best resolution is great, but seeing it in context helps one better appreciate the achievement of JWST.

This is incredibly cool, thank you!

This galaxy is more well-known as the Whirlpool Galaxy [1]. And a lot easier to google that way, avoiding confusion with the Samsung Galaxy M51 smartphone.

Also nice to see Wikipedia state its mass in familiar terms:

> Its mass is estimated to be 160 billion solar masses, or around 10.3% of the mass of Milky Way Galaxy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_Galaxy

Incidentally, there was a line of low-end washers/dryers in the 90s/2000s made by Whirlpool and branded Galaxy.

Ha! (All kidding aside, avoid Whirlpool appliances, their longevity is short.)

The NIRCam image has a fuzzy feel to it, almost a soft focus feel. It looks like an issue with the image format not able to cope with the level of detail.

The MIRI image almost looks like an entirely different subject and almost looks like a microscopic subject.

Using their viewer with the slider to compare the two images aligned is just pure awesomeness. The tech we have now to make astronomy so approachable is simply amazing.

Yes if you open only the NIRCam image (scroll down), you can get a higher resolution version of it where you can resolve individual start. It's crazy

Very pretty. Looks like one of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Paradise in the Divine Comedy:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dor%C3%A9,_Gustave_-...

>This Webb observation of M51 is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers, or FEAST.

These contrived acronyms are starting to push some uncomfortable boundaries.

You're not a real science team unless you're shoehorning in an acronym somewhere.

Sometimes we get great ones, other times we get these:

BaR-SPOrt (BAlloon-bourne Radiometers for Sky Polarisation ObseRvaTions)

GOBELINS (GOuld's BELt dIstaNces Survey)

SUGAR-RUSH (Studying the Universe with GAlaxy suRveys Revealing the Unlimited in ShangHai)

VESTALE (unVEil the darknesS of The gAlactic buLgE)

A reminder that NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day exists; each day's picture is at:

* https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

* https://apod.com/feed.rss

With the archive of past pictures:

* Back to 2015 at https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

* Back to 1995: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepixFull.html

And there is a GNOME extension to change your wallpaper to the APOD : https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1202/nasa-apod/

Awesome. I love the steady trickle of new space images and content from Webb. It lightens my day every time I get to read this stuff and reminders me there is soo much wonder left in the cosmos. Future generations will hopefully keep figuring it out!

from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope

One has to love how ESAWebb has to spell the operating agencies out every single time they mention Webb as if they're afraid of people forgetting the ESA paid for seven percent of it.

I think it's my fav space image from 2023. Various resolutions on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/53151475103/...

(although this NGC 346 composite is amazing: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/52920729828/...)

My faves from 2022:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/52534406448/...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/52533787586/...

Stuff like this is material for a background image on desktop. I use Bing Wallpaper of the Day for that (you can download the picture with 3rd party clients). This way, I always get the same background on every computer, but it changes every day, so whether I like it or not it is very temporary. Meanwhile, when my kids see it, it sometimes inspires them. For example, my left screen has all kind of fingers on it from Sunday afternoon when my son saw a labyrinth (its OK, I will clean it).

In AOSP / F-Droid there is Muzei which has a hook for astronomy pictures (NASA, specifically) [1]. Though it also has a Bing hook (it is modular). Smartphones have a different resolution so meh.

[1] https://github.com/kollerlukas/NasaMuzei

Webb has surprised me more than I hoped it would. Incredible.

You gotta be kidding me. Are those the stars of M51 individually resolved all over the image?

The stars you see clearly are from our galaxy that we are looking through towards M51.

The M51 galaxy has 160B stars in it. It looks like clouds to us but it is just lots and lots of stars.

Actually, after taking a second, third and fourth look at these, and as a backyard astrophotographer for 18 years, I'm going to say these actually are all individually resolved stars and clusters in M51. Clearly in this https://cdn.esawebb.org/archives/images/large/potm2308b.jpg

You can tell they are M51 stars, but that there are just a handful of bright, HUGE foreground Milky Way stars in the shot.

Especially considering the Ursa Major location of M51 well outside of our own Milky Way plane, there isn't a ton of foreground stars lying on the galaxies compared to other galaxies seen through the plane of our own.

When I photograph M31 Andromeda, which is hugely closer, with my 8 inch refractor, you can just start to see the resolution of these extra-galactic large clusters, as in: https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/128625703/original

So this seems right that this huge aperture scope would resolve in M51. Just wait until they shoot the large clusters in M33 and M31 !!

Here is my own M51 https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/154398728/original

Individually resolved? Not in general, I think at least most would be foreground stars in the Milky Way.

We can resolve stars in other galaxies in some cases, but especially those big bright ones all over are almost certainly from the foreground.

So much space and so much matter! And here down we are killing each other for a few grains of sand.

Now I wonder what a time lapse video of it would look like

Probably quite pretty if you could take a photo every million years or so (for a comparison, the Sun makes one orbit around the center of the Milky Way roughly every 226 million years).

The time scales involved! There is no known physical mechanism by which we could ever share information with this galaxy and have any semblance of “now”. It’s just impossible, as far as our science knows. That’s humbling. It’s a yawning chasm.

Beautiful. And the full size image is 8108 × 2746 pixels.

Wikipedia says 32 Mly, maybe needs an update?

The Wikipedia ref link to NED says (Mpc):

Min. 2.450 Mean 7.225 Median 7.800 Max. 12.200

Std. Dev 2.12

So million light years (Mly): mean 23.5, median 25.4, +- 6.9

That makes Wikipedia text itself very wrong (32 Mly) and the article (27 Mly) slightly better, but not actually in the mean-median range.

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/objsearch?objname=NGC+5...

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