Messier 109

M109 (NGC 3992) is a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major (The Big Dipper). At magnitude 9.8 it cannot be seen with the naked eye. M109 is in the center of the photo. In Stellarium M109 is called the “Vacuum Cleaner Galaxy.”

M109 in center

The bright star in the upper right of the photo is Phecda (magnitude 2.4) in the Big Dipper.

North (toward Polaris) is up in the photo. The picture was taken with a fully modified Canon Rebel camera (this is my one shot color camera) on a TEC 140 telescope in the Alpenglow-Torrey House Observatory in the dark sky community of Torrey, Utah (Bortle 2-3). The ten best of 14 60-second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = ten minute photo. Unguided, binned 2X2 (to make smaller files for remote transfer), no calibration frames. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

Source: Astrometry.net

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