Fireworks Galaxy, NGC6946

Notes

The Fireworks Galaxy is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy. According to Wikipedia, it is about 22 MLY away from Earth. It lies within the Virgo supercluster of galaxies. It is about 87,000 LY across, which makes it roughly the same size as our Milky Way (also a spiral galaxy). It presumably gets its name from the bright red spots on the spiral arms; these are the active Ha sources.

I captured the images for this galaxy over about 7 nights during September. The first set of images were taken with a broadband filter that allows most of the light spectrum through. The second set of images used a dual-band filter which focused on the Ha and O2 sources. From that second set, I extracted just the Ha and combined with the broadband to produce this image.

After you see a few galaxies, you can be forgiven for thinking that most look alike. And that is a little bit of the point here. Our Milky Way is not at all unique. There are millions and maybe billions of galaxies very similar to ours. And each of those likely has many star systems and planets that are rough analogs to ours. After an image of every galaxy I take, I think for a while. Does this one have them?

Fireworks Galaxy, NGC6946

September 2023

Gallery

Notes