Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744
5.12.2019

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 and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes.

POX 186: Not So Long Ago
3.01.2003

Not so long ago and not so far, far away, a galaxy was born. Seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image, the island universe of stars, gas, and dust cataloged as POX 186 is a mere 68 million light-years distant toward an uncrowded region in the constellation Virgo.

UGC 12591: The Fastest Rotating Galaxy Known
19.02.2020

Why does this galaxy spin so fast? To start, even identifying which type of galaxy UGC 12591 is difficult -- featured on the lower left, it has dark dust lanes like a spiral galaxy but a large diffuse bulge of stars like a lenticular.

Bright Spiral Galaxy M81
18.11.2014

One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful M81. This grand spiral galaxy can be found toward the northern constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major).

Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud
29.06.2018

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring intertellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy.

The Galactic Center in Infrared
19.04.2021

What does the center of our galaxy look like? In visible light, the Milky Way's center is hidden by clouds of obscuring dust and gas. But in this stunning vista, the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared cameras, penetrate much of the dust revealing the stars of the crowded galactic center region.

The California Nebula
12.01.2016

What's California doing in space? Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States.

Herschel s Andromeda
2.02.2013

This infrared view from the Herschel Space Observatory explores the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. Only 2.5 million light-years distant, the famous island universe is also known to astronomers as M31. Andromeda spans over 200,000 light-years making it more the twice the size of the Milky Way.

Stars in the Infrared Sky
18.09.1996

What if you could see infrared light? Because this light is less absorbed by dust than visible light, you could peer into the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The stars there are normally hidden from direct view by the interstellar dust clouds which line the Galactic plane.

NGC 6712: Galactic Globular Cluster
25.02.1999

Following orbits which loop high above the galactic plane, globular star clusters are probably 12 to 14 billion years old - truly ancient denizens of our Milky Way Galaxy. After analyzing these new ESO/VLT images...