Time to Meet the Neighbors!
Spiral Galaxy NGC 0895 was discovered by William Herschel in 1785. Herschel created the first maps of the Milky Way galaxy by observing and drawing the stars. Herschel also saw galaxies outside the Milky Way, but he didn’t know what they were, so he only referred to them generically as nebulae. That was the common term at the time for diffuse, extended objects – including actual nebulae, which are the gaseous remains of exploded stars.
Galaxy NGC 0895 is located in the constellation Cetus, about 110 million light years away – still a fraction (about 0.2 percent) of the observable universe. The star nearest to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, and the nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away.
We can tell how many stars are forming by how blue the galaxy appears through the camera lens. Blue galaxies contain many young, newly formed stars. The golden object in the upper right is a redder galaxy, which has many more older red stars, and fewer still forming.
If you want to find NGC 0895 yourself, it is located at coordinates (RA 02 21 36.5, Dec -05 31 16).
This image was taken with the Dark Energy Camera, and shows us this galaxy in sharper detail than we have ever seen it. Check back here every Monday for another image and another story from the Dark Detectives at DES.
Dark Energy Detectives 