The Supernova in Galaxy M61 is Hanging in There

This is an update to my May 16 post. The sky was clear and moonless last Friday night, so I was able to check back in on the M61 supernova. A month later, it has faded only a little bit. I’m happy to report that the “seeing” was better this night, so this image shows somewhat more detail in the galaxy compared to my earlier images.

A field of galaxies near M49

Here is an interesting field of galaxies in the constellation Virgo. The brightest is Messier 49, an elliptical galaxy. It is perhaps five times larger than our Milky Way galaxy and about 60 million light years distant. Since elliptical galaxies have no discernable structure, they just appear as fuzzy blobs.

The Needle Galaxy

NGC 4565, the Needle Galaxy, is one of the most prominent and famous edge-on spiral galaxies in the sky.

The Perseus Double Cluster

Two for the price of one! The Double Cluster consists of two open star clusters, known as H and Chi Persei (also called NGC 884 and 869).

The Andromeda Galaxy

If you’ve ever seen a picture of another galaxy, odds are that it was of this one, the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31. At a distance of 2.54 million light years from us, it is closer and hence appears larger than any other galaxy (apart from the two Magellanic Clouds in the southern hemisphere that are small satellites of our Milky Way). And it is on a collision course with us and will collide with our Milky Way in about four billion years.

Open Clusters

Scattered mostly along the Milky Way are stellar groupings called open clusters, randomly shaped families of mostly young, hot stars that are all gravitationally bound to each other. Most stars are born in such clusters, containing anything between perhaps twenty to a few thousand stars. All of the stars in a given cluster are about the same age, having formed together from the same nebula.

Globular Clusters

Here are four representative Globular clusters. Globular Clusters are gigantic spherical agglomerations of stars that surround the nucleus of our Milky Way galaxy. Each globular cluster from hundreds of thousands to several million stars, and astronomers believe that the stars is most globular clusters are among the oldest stars in existance, perhaps as much as 10 billion years old.

A New Supernova in Nearby Galaxy M61

This supernova was discovered on May 6. It is expected to continue to brighten for several days before fading away over several weeks.

Two Face-on Spiral Galaxies - A Study in Contrasts

M94 is a face-on spiral galaxy whose spiral arms hug the middle and wind very tightly into the core. It is sometimes called the Cat’s Eye galaxy or the or Croc’s Eye Galaxy. It is about 16 million light years from the Earth. Around the brilliant circular disk is a ring of active star-forming regions, revealed in astrophotography as blue young star clusters. This artifact delineates it from the faded outer ring of an older yellowish stellar population.

Comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS

Comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS has been a big disappointment. It was discovered just four months ago, on December 28, 2019. Initially it brightened much more quickly than expected, and there were hopes that it might reach naked-eye visibility in late May when it will pass closest to the sun and to the earth. However its nucleus was observed to fragment by early April, and as a result it started getting dimmer instead of brighter. You can see pictures of the fragments taken by the Hubble Space Telescope by clicking on this link.