🌌 SpacePicture of a Day: Spiral Galaxy NGC 1512: Wide Field 🪐
Most galaxies don't have any rings -- why does this galaxy have three? To begin, a ring that's near NGC 1512's center -- and so hard to see here -- is the nuclear ring which glows brightly with recently formed stars. Next out is a ring of stars and dust appearing both red and blue, called, counter-intuitively, the inner ring. This inner ring connects ends of a diffuse central bar of stars that runs horizontally across the galaxy. Farthest out in this wide field image is a ragged structure that might be considered an outer ring. This outer ring appears spiral-like and is dotted with clusters of bright blue stars. All these ring structures are thought to be affected by NGC 1512's own gravitational asymmetries in a drawn-out process called secular evolution. The featured image was captured last month from a telescope at Deep Sky Chile in Chile.
HD image: LINK 🛸
Copyright: **
Daniel Stern
** 🔭
Project Website: LINK 🚀
| Name | Craft |
|---|---|
| Oleg Kononenko | ISS |
| Nikolai Chub | ISS |
| Tracy Caldwell Dyson | ISS |
| Matthew Dominick | ISS |
| Michael Barratt | ISS |
| Jeanette Epps | ISS |
| Alexander Grebenkin | ISS |
| Butch Wilmore | ISS |
| Sunita Williams | ISS |
| Li Guangsu | Tiangong |
| Li Cong | Tiangong |
| Ye Guangfu | Tiangong |
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