STARRY'S ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY
The pictures posted are taken by myself from my Observatory in Coonabarabran using a digital SLR camera. I am happy to post astro pictures from others if they wish. Leave your email address in my guestbook.
The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as M83 is a barred spiral galaxy that lies 15 million light years from us. Our Milky Way Galaxy probably looks similar to this with our sun lying roughly half way out in one of the spiral arms. M83 lies in the constellation Hydra near Centaurus.
The blue and red regions in the spiraal arms are where hot young stars are being born out of gaseous nebulae. The galaxy is fairly active with 6 supernovae being observed in the last century. None have been observed in our galaxy in this period.
Just as our galaxy is associated with a group of galaxies (called imaginatively as the local group), M83 is part of the M83 group. This group also includes Centaurus A and NGC 4945 which both appear in my galaxy image page. M83 is receding from us at 337 km/second. Now thats flying. This is calculated by measuring its red shift or in other words how far the spectral lines in the light spectrum of the galaxy is shifted to longer wavelengths. M83 was the first galaxy to be discovered beyond the Local Group.
This picture was taken at prime focus with a F/6.3 focal reducer using a 14" Meade LX200GPS Telescope and a canon 300D camera near Coonabarabran NSW Australia on 11/03/2005. The photo is made up of 50 30 second exposues equivalent to an exposure time of 25 minutes. Processing was done using Maxim DL software..