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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 !!
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.
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/