Posted on 01/29/2016 1:47:02 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant in the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis. A sprawling island universe, IC 342 would otherwise be a prominent galaxy in our night sky, but it is hidden from clear view and only glimpsed through the veil of stars, gas and dust clouds along the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy. Even though IC 342's light is dimmed by intervening cosmic clouds, this deep telescopic image traces the galaxy's obscuring dust, blue star clusters, and glowing pink star forming regions along spiral arms that wind far from the galaxy's core. IC 342 may have undergone a recent burst of star formation activity and is close enough to have gravitationally influenced the evolution of the local group of galaxies and the Milky Way.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit and Copyright: Fabiomassimo Castelluzzo]
That’s kinda perdy. Too bad our own eyes don’t see things that way.
Wonder what the exposure length was.
I think you can only get colors like this in a composite using RGB filters. This was probably Hubble. A 24” would get pretty close, though, if you have a few thousand bucks just lying around.
Pretty cool! I wonder if someone on a planet in that galaxy is looking at our galaxy in a very same way thinking how “cool is that”?
“In my Fathers house are many mansions...” Always comes to mind
“In my Fathers house are many mansions...” Always comes to mind
More than the exposure length is the number of images. Typically thousands of images are stacked to produce a single photo. Each are filtered and false-colored to give the image we finally see.
Ooooo...Ahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!
Yes and no. Colors in the visible spectrum are enhanced, invisible are false-colored. We can never see IR, nor can we see hydrogen, helium, etc. without modification.
Something else about the color.
This galaxy, along with Maffei 1 and Maffei 2 are in “The Forbidden Zone” (the Zone of Avoidance doesn’t sound as dramatic).
The are in line with the Milky Way for us, so, we are looking through a lot dust and gas to see them.
They are rather close to the Milky Way. Maffei 1 would be one of the brightest galaxies in the sky if it wasn’t for the Milky Way.
More here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_342/Maffei_Group
They might well. We have to look through our galactic plane at their galaxy, but the Milky Way is situated at a high angle to theirs. They would see the Milky Way approximately edge-on.
They'd need telescopes, though ... Andromeda is the nearest galaxy to ours, and to the naked eye it's just a smudge that doesn't start to get interesting until you put about a 10x glass on it.
And of course the light reaching us is Early Pliocene in age ... guys with giant space telescopes in that galaxy peering through our atmosphere might spot our ancestors lurching around the East African countryside as it was then, and strange, huge beasts wandering around -- titanotheres and things like that. Einstein will not be mocked.
Thanks!
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