Astronomy Picture Of The Day: the "Hidden Galaxy"

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole

@konstructivizm

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That's a lovely description of IC 342, often nicknamed the "Hidden Galaxy" for good reason!To add a few interesting details:IC 342 is actually one of the closest bright spiral galaxies to the Milky Way (around 10–11 million light-years), and it would be one of the most prominent galaxies in our sky if it weren’t almost perfectly obscured behind the dense star fields and dust of our own galactic plane in Cepheus (not Giraffe—Camelopardalis, the Giraffe, is correct though!). It’s the third-closest relatively massive galaxy group member after Maffei 1 and M33, making it a key target for studying nearby galaxy evolution. Because of the heavy foreground extinction (up to 2–3 magnitudes in visible light), infrared and radio observations are especially valuable. That’s why telescopes like Spitzer, JWST, and large radio arrays have given us some of the clearest views of its structure. The Hubble image you’re referring to (often the one processed by Cristi Agapi) beautifully reveals the tightly wound spiral arms, the bright yellow-orange bulge full of older stars, and all those vivid pink HII regions and blue star clusters tracing active star http://formation.Fun fact: IC 342 is sometimes considered a possible member of the very loose IC 342/Maffei Group, which may be the nearest galaxy group to the Local Group.Would you like a link to the high-resolution Hubble image, or are you interested in recent JWST observations of it? JWST has started peeling away even more of the dust veil in the near- and mid-infrared.