ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

This image is of NGC 1300. Discovered by John Herschel on December 11, 1835, it is a spiral galaxy with arms extending from the ends of a spectacularly prominent central bar. It is considered a prototypical example of barred spiral galaxies and lies at a distance of about 65 million light-years, in the constellation of Eridanus (the River).

The image was made in infrared light with the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. HAWK-I is one of the most powerful infrared imagers in the world, and this is one of the sharpest and most detailed pictures of this galaxy ever taken from Earth. The filters used were Y (shown here in dark blue), J (in light blue), H (in green), and K (in red). The field of view of the image is about 6.4 arcminutes.