Photo of the Week for May 22, 2015
High overhead on spring evenings is the popular face-on galaxy, M101, in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy can be found under dark skies by following a string of stars curving eastward from Mizar, the middle star in the Big Dipper’s handle. With a good-sized telescope, you can make out M101’s main spiral arms, but the finest details that show up in photographs, like this one by Victoria, British Columbia, imager Daniel Posey, are impossible to discern visually.
Posey recorded this image at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Victoria Centre’s observatory, located on the grounds of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory on Little Saanich Mountain. He used a Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera attached to the facility’s 14-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope to acquire a total of 2 hours and 40 minutes of exposure at ISO 1600.
