4 ms·

The stars you see clearly are from our galaxy that we are looking through towards M51. The M51 galaxy has 160B stars in it. It looks like clouds to us but it

• mikeInAlaska 3y ago
  Actually, after taking a second, third and fourth look at these, and as a backyard astrophotographer for 18 years, I'm going to say these actually are all individually resolved stars and clusters in M51. Clearly in this https://cdn.esawebb.org/archives/images/large/potm2308b.jpg https://cdn.esawebb.org/archives/images/large/potm2308b.jpg You can tell they are M51 stars, but that there are just a handful of bright, HUGE foreground Milky Way stars in the shot. Especially considering the Ursa Major location of M51 well outside of our own Milky Way plane, there isn't a ton of foreground stars lying on the galaxies compared to other galaxies seen through the plane of our own. When I photograph M31 Andromeda, which is hugely closer, with my 8 inch refractor, you can just start to see the resolution of these extra-galactic large clusters, as in: https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/128625703/original https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/128625703/original So this seems right that this huge aperture scope would resolve in M51. Just wait until they shoot the large clusters in M33 and M31 !! Here is my own M51 https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/154398728/original https://pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/154398728/original