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Messier Catalog 1-110 at the same magnification. (apod.nasa.gov)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/astronomy@mander.xyz
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Sylvain Villet, APOD 2026-05-14.

A collection of photos of M1-M110 including supernova remnants, galaxies, nebulae, and stellar clusters.
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[–] 4 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Dumb dumb here, is M33 the Milky Way, our home galaxy? Even if not, how would we ever acquire an actual imagine of our own galaxy. The orbiting telescopes like JWST would probably need to travel light years to reach far enough away to turn around and take a picture of our own galaxy, no?

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    M33 is the triangulum galaxy, the milky way is not a Messier object, but the clusters and nebulae in the list are inside the milky way

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Would be nice to have the Milky Way as reference even if didn't mean anything scientifically, just to reinforce the reality of how insignificant we are.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    We can't take a picture of the Milky Way cause we're inside the Milky Way. We have no way of getting a camera far enough away to get a picture.

    Some of those objects are similar size to the Milky Way such that they'd be interesting to have next to each other. Some of those objects are just small clusters of objects within the Milky Way such that they'd just be arrows to where they are in there (and mostly they're just clustered around where we are in the Milky Way)

    Basically what you're asking for is an artistic representation of our Local Group. You can see one in Wikipedia.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    this chart shows apparent size comparison, true size / distance^2, since the milky way is all around us, apparent size covers the whole field, milky way compared with other galaxies would be possible on true size chats, but if you want a reference, M31 is twice the size by length and m42 is 1/4000 compared to the milky way

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