Catching up with Messier 109 - A Spiral Galaxy

It's been quite a while since I updated my blog, nearly a year in fact. The latter half of last year and particularly the winter period wasn't very good for astrophotography because of the weather - we seemed to have weeks and weeks of cloudy skies with very few breaks. The winter constellations like Orion will have to wait for another year! 

It was very similar at the start of this year too, but things got a little better in February and March and I managed to make some progress in my images and image processing techniques. I've managed to keep posting a few things to my Flickr account throughout this time, and now I'm turning to my blog. I'm going to work from today backwards to post all the images I've taken since last May.

So here's an image of Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) whcih is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth and contains an active nucleus classified as a Type 2 Seyfert. The presence of a central supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner light-year around the black hole. A Type II supernova was observed in M106 in May 2014. Here's a closeup view of M106 cropped from the above image. It clearly shows the galaxy's spiral arms.

And finally this widefield view of my image has been annotated in www.astrometry.net and shows how rich the region is in deep sky objects including NGC 4217, a possible companion galaxy of M106.