M82

Description: M82 is a star-forming spiral galaxy, though it doesn't look it. The reason for this is that we are seeing it edge-on. In this combination of visible and infra-red wavelengths, massive warm dust lanes can be seen in infra-red (shown here as red), which blocks out the light from the bluer star-forming regions. The bright green region (which corresponds to red light) near the center is due to recombining hydrogen in an HII region.

Image information: Stacked, dark-subtracted, registered combination of 30 x 10s unfiltered, V, R and I-band images. An unsharp mask has been used to bring out the details. Image taken 09/03/2007 23:30 UT.

Physical information: Magnitude: 9.2, size: 10.5'x5.1', p.a. 65 degrees, classification: Sd, aka NGC3034, Arp337, Ursa Major A.

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