Photo of the Week for January 31, 2014
In mid-January, a supernova erupted in galaxy M82 in the constellation Ursa Major. By intergalactic standards, M82 is a near neighbour, at a distance of 12 million light-years from Earth. At its brightest, the supernova (indicated in the photo above with an arrow) looked like a 10.6-magnitude “star,” apparently in front of the galaxy.
Daniel Meek of Calgary, Alberta, took this image of M82 on January 24, using a 5-inch Tele Vue-NP127is refractor and a QSI 583wsg CCD camera with a 2× Tele Vue Powermate Barlow lens. Six hours of RGB data were combined to create his colour image.
