This is so far my deepest and sharpest astrophoto. M 106 is an extensive galaxy with a considerbly bright central bulge, but much fainter spiral arms. With a total exposure of 5 hours this picture went not only as far out as into the 23 million light years distance of M106, but way beyond. All the tiny lenses and spirals and even more the brown smudges extend to distances hardly comprehensable to the human mind. Light from distances of one billion light years and more happened to be captured by my scope. The cluster of brown smudges to the upper right is the galaxy cluster ClG J1217+4730, better known as Zwicky 5032. With a redshift of 0.27 the light travelled about 3.1 billion years until it finally made it to arrive at planet earth! When I searched the field of view after having finished the picture processing, I was reminded of "Hubble's Deep Field" which found out that even after the ultimate exposure marathons there are still places of darkness...

But back to M 106. The apparently symmetrical structure appears to be a bit distorted. The galaxy undergoes vivid star formation astronomers call a "starburst" phase. This stage of a galaxy is usually triggered by gravitational interaction with other galaxies. There may be quite some candidates among the companions around M106 which may have imprinted some of the history of interactions into the shape of the galaxy, who knows?

Again, a click on the picture will deliver a larger version. But if you want to search for even more details - at the expense of more noise - there is a special high resolution version available.

The night was one of the best in terms of steady air. The only flaw in this picture is that it needed serious cropping because of an off-axis light infall which was caused by a naked-eye star outside the field of view.