New View of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy from The Cosmic Companion!

The Cosmic Companion brings you a new original view of a strangely-familiar galaxy!

M83 - The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, seen in a new composite image from The Cosmic Companion, created from observations with the CHI-1 telescope from Telescope Live.

Hi all:

Here is Messier 83 (The Southern Pinwheel galaxy), seen here in a new image from The Cosmic Companion, recorded with the CHI-1 telescope in Chile from Telescope Live!

First discovered in 1752 by the French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, this beautiful spiral galaxy can be seen with a good pair of binoculars from southern skies.

Young stars being born at the edges of the dark lanes of dust seen in this image produce large amounts of ultraviolet radiation, causing regions of gas around them to glow. Clusters of blue stars and reddish star-forming regions highlight this stunning galaxy.

This spiral galaxy looks more than a little like what our own Milky Way Galaxy might look like from far away. However, M83 (as it is known to its friends) is just 50,000 light years across, about half the size of our own family of stars.

Found a little under 15 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Hydra, light in this image left its source a couple million years after great apes developed nest-making, play, drumming, and self-medication. We can only imagine the primate drum circles which ensued.

This composite image from The Cosmic Companion is composed from 24 exposures recorded over two hours in red, green, blue, and luminesce wavelengths using the 0.6-metre CHI-1 telescope, available from Telescope Live.

VIP Subscribers - your exclusive full-resolution image — without a watermark — is available below!

Clear skies!

James