Pinwheel Galaxy

This galaxy catalogued as Messier 101 is a face on spiral galaxy, and is located at a great distance of 21mil light years away in the constellation Ursa Major, the big dipper. This particular photo of it however is special, as it contains a climatic death of a star known as a supernova! The supernova, catalogued as SN2023ixf, can be seen in one of the spiral arms and is so bright, it can be easily mistaken as a star in our own galaxy blocking part of it, but as seen below you can see how it did not exist before. This was a truly special opportunity for me, as supernova are very rare for us to ever observe, even more so within our own galaxy. Acquiring this photo was quite difficult as I was working with new equipment, had a very narrow window to capture it at peak brightness, and during this time there was wildfires in Canada that brought a lot of smoke through the atmosphere in the area where this was imaged from. This photo was completed in May of 2023.