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Credit & Copyright: John Hayes
Explanation:
Big,
beautiful
spiral galaxy NGC 6744
is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than
our own Milky Way.
It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern
constellation Pavo but appears as only a faint smudge in the eyepiece
of a small telescope.
We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our
line of sight in this remarkably deep and detailed galaxy portrait,
a telescopic image that spans an area about the
angular size of a full moon.
In it, the giant galaxy's
elongated yellowish core
is dominated by the light from old, cool stars.
Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with
young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions.
An extended arm sweeps past smaller satellite galaxy NGC 6744A
at the upper left.
NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's
satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: spiral galaxy
Publications with words: spiral galaxy
See also: