Last week, I’ve collected about 5.25 hrs of total exposure of the famous Whirlpool galaxy. I photographed it almost exactly a year ago with a different camera, and it was the first galaxy image that I was quite pleased with. Well, the show itself didn’t change much in a year, although this is a galactic interaction in progress. The dwarf companion galaxy NGC 5195 has been flying past the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years, generating plumes of gas driven by the tidal forces between the two galaxies.
The M51 itself is about 400 million years old. We are seeing the stage of the intergalactic dance that actually happened quite a while ago because of how incredibly far these galaxies are. Their light travelled for 31 million years before reaching my yard in Victoria, BC.