The first colour photographs taken by the European Southern Observatory's new wide-field imager at La Silla, Chile, provide dramatic new views of the NGC 4945 galaxy.
It belongs to the Centaurus group of galaxies, so named because it is seen in that constellation, which is about 13 million light-years away. Despite this distance it is considered a "nearby" object by astronomers.
NGC 4945 is a spiral galaxy quite similar to our own Milky Way. Its spiral arms are hardly discernible because we see it nearly side-on. This view however also matches the side-on view we get looking through the Milky Way given our solar system's position in its central plane, out on its periphery and well away from the centre.
La Silla is a 2.2 metre telescope and the picture above was produced by assembling five 15-minute red band, four five-minute blue band and five 1,000-second ultraviolet band exposures, taken in January this year.
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