In the early hours of March 28, 2020 I sat down at my 8 inch SCT with my sketch pad and pencils. I had my 32mm Plossl eyepiece in the diagonal, and I was nice and comfortable in my chair. I placed my eye up to the eyepiece to see two galaxies in the middle of a collision. This is known as the Whirlpool galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. While the field of view was relatively empty as far as stars go, the real show popped right out in the eyepiece. M51 and it's collision companion M52B are roughly 23 million light years away from Earth. That means that the view we have of these two objects colliding left their galaxy 23 million years ago, and I was able to witness what it looked like all those years ago. Astronomy is a bit of a backwards time travel, and that is a fact that will always blow my mind no matter how often I look through an eyepiece at distant objects.
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| M51 the Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici |
For this sketch, other than the telescope and eyepiece I mentioned earlier, I used plain white printer paper and a variation of pencils for shading including an HB, 2B, and 4B pencil. I also used a blending stump, and inverted the image in the free editing software GIMP.
If you would like to see where to find this object in the night sky, along with the time lapse of this sketch being done be sure to watch the video below:
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