The Whirlpool Galaxy M51a

You don’t need a telescope to see this. With your eyes it looks like a bright star, with binoculars you can make out the shape. The details though really start to show with 200mm focal length and higher.

The Galaxy is 32 million light years away, meaning that the light we are looking at in this image left the galaxy 32 million years ago. It is 109,000 Light Years in diameter. it is interacting with another Galaxy NGC 5195, and can be clearly seen using it’s immense gravitational mass to rip stars from the other Galaxy, slowly integrating the two galaxies into one. it is thought that NGC 5195 passed through M51a about 500-600 million years ago and what we see here is what is left.

At the very center of M51a is a massive black hole