Things I've seen in the Great Bear in January 2016

Comet Catalina on the 19th of January. Image taken with my Canon 600D DSLR  with  a 66mm Altair Astro Lightwave refractor and field flattener on a Star Adventurer equatorial mount.

Messier 101 spiral galaxy. Image taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope.

The comet was in the same part of the sky as Messier 101 but very much closer to Earth  than the galaxy far far away. Unfortunately, I could not get both objects in the same field of view. Hence the two separate images.

Messier 101 (NGC 5457), also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is nearly 21 million light years away from us
The Pinwheel Galaxy is about 170,000 light years in diameter, roughly comparable with the Milky Way . The galaxy’s disk has 100 billion solar masses, while the bulge has about 3 billion solar masses. The galaxy disc is slightly assymetric the likely result of tidal interaction with companion galaxies.

By contrast, the nucleus of the comet is quite small, of the order of a few kilometres and  relatively close to Earth.  On the 19th of January when the above image was taken the comet was some 70 million miles distant.

Credits: Bradford Robotic Telescope and Wikipedia.