Caldwell 101 Spiral Galaxy

This animated Caldwell 101 Spiral Galaxy is just that – fantastical Galactic Timelapse. Spinning through millions of years, at the tips of your fingers.

Imagine shooting a photo of the same galaxy every million years - for a couple of billion years – to create a giant timelapse video.

Perhaps it is only a utopian dream. But with the miracle of modern technology, you can now see the history, and the mystery, of deep space. You can see spiral arms revolving around the center of a supermassive black hole. You can witness the extreme gravity pulling everything together towards the center of the galaxy.

Deep in the constellation of Pavo, also known as the "Peacock”, there lives a spiral galaxy. Caldwell 101, also known as the NGC 6744, is an intermediate spiral galaxy. It is about 30 million light-years away.

Very much like our own Milky Way Galaxy, Caldwell 101 is almost twice as big. Its massive disk stretches 175,000 light-years across. This Intermediate Spiral Galaxy is classified somewhere between a barred spiral and an unbarred spiral galaxy. A small companion galaxy is located nearby that is quite similar to our galaxy's companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This companion galaxy, called NGC 6744A for short, can be seen as a blob in the main galaxy's outer arm (lower right of the image).

To shoot distant galaxies like this requires special equipment and processing. To capture details, like the detail in this image, I use remote telescope service located in high and desert-like regions. In the desert, the light pollution is pretty low, less humidity increases the quality of seeing. Large apertures and longer focal lengths have to be used to capture deep space's true beauty and mystery.

This photo was shot using a remote access 24-inch mirrored telescope in Chile. Four different filters with a monochrome CCD sensor were used to create an LRGB image. L stands for Luminance while R, G, and B stand for Red, Green, and Blue channels. The Luminance channel is widely used in astrophotography when shooting a galaxy. It is the brightness information collected from the deep space object that allows for the capture of this image.

This series of animated photographs required years of preparation, study, observation, and process. I bring a personal and unique combination of technology, art, science, patience, and magic to my images.

This is both my passion and my life purpose.

Properties

• Edition Size: 10/10
• Artist: Mustafa Aydın
• Object Type: Spiral Galaxy
• Distance: 31 million light-years
• Telescope: Planewave CDK-24
• Dimensions: 1610x1610 pixels
• File Type: MP4
• Image Credits: Mustafa Aydın / Telescope Live