Zooming into NGC 253

Lying only 13 million light-years away from us, the spiral galaxy NGC 253 is one of the brightest in the sky. This sequence zooms into this nearly edge-on galaxy, starting with a "naked-eye" very wide-angle view, and then plunging into its heart, where a team of astronomers from Instituto de Astrofisíca de Canarias (Spain) discovered many young, massive and very dusty stellar nurseries. The sequence then blends from the visible light into a very high resolution composite of NACO images obtained with the VLT in the infrared, together with an ACS image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In the final image, the stellar nurseries appear as reddish blobs near the centre of the Galaxy.

Credit:

ESO, NASA/ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and A. Fujii

About the Video

Id:eso0902a
Release date:19 January 2009
Related releases:eso0902
Duration:48 s
Frame rate:30 fps

About the Object

Name:NGC 253
Type:Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral
Category:Galaxies

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