APOD: NGC 6384: Spiral Beyond the Stars (2013 Jul 06)

[APOD Robot]

NGC 6384: Spiral Beyond the Stars

Explanation: The universe is filled with galaxies. But to see them astronomers must look out beyond the stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. This colorful Hubble Space Telescopic portrait features spiral galaxy NGC 6384, about 80 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. At that distance, NGC 6384 spans an estimated 150,000 light-years, while the Hubble close-up of the galaxy's central region is about 70,000 light-years wide. The sharp image shows details in the distant galaxy's blue star clusters and dust lanes along magnificent spiral arms, and a bright core dominated by yellowish starlight. Still, the individual stars seen in the picture are all in the relatively close foreground, well within our own galaxy. The brighter Milky Way stars show noticeable crosses, or diffraction spikes, caused by the telescope itself.

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[Boomer12k]

Hubble is always AWESOME!!! Look at that detail...like stirring cream into coffee....a sea of stars.

This....is.....all....most.....hyp....no....tic.....zzzzzzzzzzzzz

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[bmesser]

Hi

There's no doubt about it NGC 6384 is a great spiral galaxy - but we've seen exactly the same image a couple of times in the last 18 months.

Most of the times when you show a repeat you show greater resolution but not with this one.

I get the hankering at times to go where no man has gone before - what about NGC 1 or NGC 1001 or even NGC 1234? I can't believe you can't source those entries - perhaps they aren't that interesting, but with the whole NGC catalogue to go at there should be some equally splendid images that you can show without revisiting ones you've already shown.

I really do love your site and checking today's image of the day is always the first thing I do after booting up, keep up the good work.

Bruce.

[Case]

It is a beautiful galaxy.
It is very dim, though. At mag 10.60, it is fainter than Saturn’s moon Titan (mag 9.07), while the 3 arcminute width of the Hubble image is also close to the distance from Titan to Saturn in our sky today.
A quarter of the light from Titan, but spread out over a vastly larger area.

[starsurfer]

Hi

There's no doubt about it NGC 6384 is a great spiral galaxy - but we've seen exactly the same image a couple of times in the last 18 months.

Most of the times when you show a repeat you show greater resolution but not with this one.

I get the hankering at times to go where no man has gone before - what about NGC 1 or NGC 1001 or even NGC 1234? I can't believe you can't source those entries - perhaps they aren't that interesting, but with the whole NGC catalogue to go at there should be some equally splendid images that you can show without revisiting ones you've already shown.

I really do love your site and checking today's image of the day is always the first thing I do after booting up, keep up the good work.

Bruce.

Not only the NGC but there's lots of other deep sky object catalogues they could include images of objects from. The universe is incomprehensibly vast!

[geckzilla]

I get the hankering at times to go where no man has gone before - what about NGC 1 or NGC 1001 or even NGC 1234? I can't believe you can't source those entries - perhaps they aren't that interesting, but with the whole NGC catalogue to go at there should be some equally splendid images that you can show without revisiting ones you've already shown.

Can you imagine what APOD would be like going through the entire NGC catalog? Faint, blurry galaxy after blurry galaxy with about the same information conveyed day to day. The only way to get a good image of many of them is to dedicate a lot of time from a big telescope to them and there isn't much to be gained from doing the entire list for the sake of completion. Anyway, the repeats happen when the editors take breaks. Sometimes we get lucky with something new on the weekend but it's almost invariably at least a previously run description.

[owlice]

Hi

There's no doubt about it NGC 6384 is a great spiral galaxy - but we've seen exactly the same image a couple of times in the last 18 months.

Most of the times when you show a repeat you show greater resolution but not with this one.

Where, please? In searching APOD, I see this particular galaxy shown twice before, on March 22, 2011, and on July 12, 2007. The latter APOD is a different image entirely; the March, 2011 image -- shown on APOD over two years ago -- is today's Hubble image, which was released in February, 2011. I did not find this image appearing in the past 18 months at all, nor "a couple of times" before ever. Maybe my searching is in error?

In any case, APOD does, by design, show repeated images; here is what the APOD FAQ says about repeats:

Q4: Have some APOD pictures been run more than once?
A4: Yes. Many of our readers have been with us less than a year and are unaware of some really spectacular or important astronomy pictures. New information about old pictures is becoming available over the WWW. The text and links for rerun pictures will make use of this newly available information. So although the picture might be old, some of the text and links of each APOD will be new. Also, more web surfers have larger bandwidth connections, which allows us to post higher-resolution image files that can be transferred conveniently. Software to handle more sophisticated image file formats has also become more common, so the picture's size and/or format might be new. Lastly, rerunning APODs saves us time and helps us update our archive. In general, our rerun policy currently is to only rerun APODs more than one year old to keep the pictures relatively "new" to new APOD viewers. We will almost never rerun more than two pictures in any given week. So when you load the current APOD,it is still, most probably, a new picture.

[LocalColor]

Wonderful image.

[starchaser]

It is a magnificent picture of a true island universe, I could loose myself just watching it's sea of stars!

Pictures like this one really makes me feel small and insignificant!

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

It is a magnificent picture of a true island universe, I could loose myself just watching it's sea of stars!

Pictures like this one really makes me feel small and insignificant!

[Beyond]

Ah, that was right after the little guy defeated the spider nebula. I think he was really just on his way down to check on something at the Planck level.