August 10, 2018
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744
Birthday · August 10, 2018
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APOD published August 10, 2018. Credit: Martin Pugh. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes. We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our line of sight. This remarkably detailed galaxy portrait covers an area about the angular size of the full moon. In it, the giant galaxy's elongated yellowish core is dominated by the light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions. An extended arm sweeps past a smaller satellite galaxy at the upper left. NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. This Weekend: Meteor showers expected, Moon bites Sun (again)
Image credit: Martin Pugh