noirlab_noirlab2107a February 8th, 2021
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois) Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, Messier 83 (or NGC 5236) is a stunning face-on spiral galaxy located about 15 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydra. Its spiral arms are lined with dark lanes of dust and peppered with reddish, star-forming clouds of hydrogen gas. One of the deepest images ever taken of the Southern Pinwheel (combining more than 11 hours of exposure time), this view was captured with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was built by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab. Numerous background galaxies, which lie much farther away than Messier 83, appear around the edges of the image.
Provider: NOIRLab
Image Source: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noirlab2107a/
Curator: NSF's NOIRLab, Tucson, AZ, USA
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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