Photo of the Week for February 6, 2015
M81 is a wonderfully symmetrical spiral situated in Ursa Major, and is half of the well known M81/M82 galaxy pair. Both galaxies lie at a distance of roughly 11 million light years. In his Scoping the Sky column in the March/April 2015 issue of SkyNews (page 22), Ken Hewitt-White refers to the duo as the Beauty and the Beast. For obvious reasons, M81 is the Beauty.
Calgary, Alberta, imager Daniel Meek captured this galactic portrait with a 5-inch telescope in January, 2015. He used a Tele Vue NP127is f/5.2 apochromatic refractor and a QSI 583wsg CCD camera for this 330 minute HaRGB image. More of Daniel’s work can be seen here.
