Open in 3DWhat it is
A spiral seen exactly edge-on, which is how the Milky Way would look from far outside along its plane.
The picture hangs at that distance facing Earth, as large as it is on the sky; how deep the object is cannot be seen, so it is flat.
The picture
- Taken by
- European Southern Observatory
- Picture spans
- about 80,000 ly
- From the Sun
- 40 million light-years
- RA / Dec
- 189.09° / 25.99°
- Credit
- ESO
NGC 4565
NGC 4565 is an edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. It lies close to the North Galactic Pole and has a visual magnitude of approximately 10.42. It is a prominent example of an edge-on spiral galaxy, known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile. It was discovered by William Herschel on 6 April 1785.
From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA · Read the article
Far beyond
- Whirlpool GalaxySpiral galaxy, M51 · 28 million light-years3D
Picture: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/George Hatfield and Flynn Haase
- Sombrero GalaxySpiral galaxy, M104 · 31.1 million light-years3D
- Centaurus AElliptical galaxy with a dust lane, NGC 5128 · 12.4 million light-years3D
- Webb's First Deep FieldGalaxy cluster SMACS 0723 · 5.1 billion light-years3D
- M87*, imagedEvent Horizon Telescope, 2019 · 53.5 million light-years3D
- Stephan's QuintetGroup of galaxies · 290 million light-years3D
- Pinwheel GalaxySpiral galaxy, M101 · 21 million light-years3D
- Messier 87Giant elliptical galaxy · 53.5 million light-years3D
Picture: Digitized Sky Survey 2 (STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, UKSTU/AAO), via CDS hips2fits