A beautiful spiral galaxy roughly 40 million lightyears away

Milky Way’s Twin

This is my first effort at capturing a view of NGC 7331, a beautiful spiral galaxy roughly 40 million lightyears away. For a time it was thought to be super similar to our Milky Way, being roughly the same size as a spiral, having roughly the same number of stars (a trillion!), etc. However, we now believe that the Milky Way is a barred spiral (meaning it has a central bar shape of stars through its core), while NGC 7331 is not.

The background galaxies you can see in my shot were also initially considered to grouped with NGC 7331, but in reality they are 350-400 million lightyears further away. They only appear to be a group due to the happenstance of alignment in our skies.

This image combines about 30 hours of exposure time captured over the past month with my Planewave CDK17 telescope.

I will never get over seeing entire galaxies like this and the realization that they contain soooo much reality within them all the way down to their trillions of stars and systems.