M51 – The Whirlpool Galaxy
NGC 5195 the smaller galaxy

25 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici are an interacting galaxy pair. They are just “below” the end of the Big Dipper’s handle.
M51 is about 76000 light years wide grand-design spiral galaxy is less than half the size of the Milky Way, while the much smaller, NGC 5195 is a dwarf galaxy. Visually this is smaller than half the size of the moon, and a magnitude of 8.4.

This image was created with 279 45 second exposures, it was corrected with 63 dark frames, 105 flats and 107 bias exposures. The light frames are 700mm @ f8, 45 seconds long and ISO 200.
I shot it with an unmodified Nikon D7200 and a Nikkor 500 f4P ED and a TC-14B all sitting on top of a Orion SkyView Pro.
You are reading that correctly, my camera was shooting photos for over 3 and a half hours to make this picture.