February 28, 1997
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
Edge-On Spiral Galaxy NGC 891 Credit and Copyright:
Birthday · February 28, 1997
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published February 28, 1997. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Behind the image
Edge-On Spiral Galaxy NGC 891 Credit and Copyright:
Original APOD · February 28, 1997 ↗Is our Galaxy this thin? We believe so. The Milky Way, like NGC 891 pictured above, has the width of a typical spiral galaxy. Spirals have most of their bright stars, gas, and obscuring dust in a thin disk. This disk can be so thin the spiral galaxy appears edge-on like a compact disk seen sideways. The dark band across the middle is a lane of dust which absorbs light. Some of the billions of stars that orbit the center of NGC 891, however, appear to be moving too fast to just be traveling in circles. What causes this peculiar motion? One hypothesis is that NGC 891 has a large bar across its center - a bar that would be obvious were we to see this galaxy face-on instead of edge-on. This false color picture was constructed from 3 near infrared images.