The Age of Origin - Galaxies

It's no secret that I am a big fan of smart telescopes, so I was quite interested when Celestron introduced their new Origin smart telescope last year. I was able to get one in November and I thought I would use this post to show off some of the images that I have taken with it. This post will focus just on images of galaxies.

Most of the images here are less than an hour of observing time and have minimal post processing by me, showing off how impressive the Origin is at capturing the cosmos. 

One of my first targets was Messier 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. 

Two of its satellite galaxies are visible. M32 on the right and M110 in the upper left. 

The Origin has a wider field of view than the Unistellar telescopes that I have been using, but its not big enough to catch all of M31. Later this year I'll try a mosaic to try to capture the full view.

Also located within the constellation of Andromeda is the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891. At a distance of 32 million light years its 14.5 times farther away than M31, so it looks somewhat lonely in space.

NGC 891 has a nice dust lane that cuts across it and may be somewhat similar to our own Milky Way galaxy.

NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, is located 12 million light years away and is a nice target:

Located at about the same distance, but in different part of the sky is a great pair of galaxies Messier 82 and Messier 81 in Ursa Major.

That's M82 on the left. M82 is classified as a "starburst" galaxy due to a period of rapid star formation, which is likely the result gravitational interactions with M81 at right.

Two galaxies at once is nice, but how about three?

 Here are the three galaxies of the Leo Triplet.

That's NGC 3628 (the Hamburger Galaxy) at left, Messier 66 in the lower right and Messier 65 is above that. At a distance of 42 million light years M65 is the furthest of the three, while NGC 3628 is the closest with a distance of "only" 35 million light years.

Looking further out into space and you can take in many galaxies at once. Here's a portion of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies known as Markarian's Chain.

The view is dominated by two giant elliptical galaxies: Messier 84 near the top right and Messier 86 near the center. Respectively they are 66 and 57 million light years away. Numerous other galaxies of the Virgo Cluster can be seen as well.

I have yet to shoot even more distant galaxy clusters, so I'll end with two galaxies that just look good.

 

That's Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, at right. Its spiral arms spin out to the left to a smaller galaxy, NGC 5195. The two galaxies are interacting and located some 28 and 25 million light years away respectively. M51 was the first galaxy discovered to have a spiral shape is a beautiful target.

My next post will show off some of the nebulae I have photographed using the Celestron Origin.