The Pinwheel’s new star

Sergey Trudolyubov, taken from Pine, Arizona

The supernova SN 2023ixf was discovered May 19 by Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki in M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, just 21 million light-years away. It appears as the bright star in the spiral arm on the left side of this photograph, with four diffraction spikes. Data for this LRGB image was taken on the nights of May 24-25 with a 10-inch Newtonian reflector and 9.6 hours of exposure.