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Community photo entitled  by Patrick Prokop on 05/28/2023 at Savannah, GA, USA

On 05/28/2023 02:00 am by Patrick Prokop| Savannah, GA, USA

Supernova 2023 ixf in the Pinwheel Galaxy ... Messier 101.
This system is about 21 million light-years from us ... so ... this event happened 21 million years ago and the light is just now arriving to us here on Earth. This supernova is most likely from a core collapse of a massive star at the end of its life.

I took an image of this galaxy last year in June and you can compare it to now. You can see the massive size of the star in the explosion and its brightness. It is so bright, it generated a halo through my filter on the camera.

I took these images using the Orion EON 130mm Triplet Refractor. The camera was the ZWO 071 one-shot color with a sensor temperature set at -10°C. The Supernova image is composed of 4hr of total exposure time. I shot the first hour using an IR/UV cut filter and the next 3 hours using the Optolong L-Pro filter

Orion EON 130mm Refractor Telescope

comparison of an image from last June to that of May 28 of this year showing the supernova