A feathery spiral in Sagittarius


A galaxy with tightly wound, dusty blue spiral arms surrounds a glowing golden-yellow core, seen face-on against a dark, star-flecked background dotted with a few smaller, fainter galaxies. A bright blue-white star sits just to the left of the galaxy, and an orange star glows near the bottom edge of the frame.

Mike Selby/Warren Keller, taken from El Sauce Observatory, Chile

NGC 6902 is a rarely-imaged face-on spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Sagittarius. Its outer blue arms are filamentary, winding around a bright, yellow core of older stars. The image was taken with a 17-inch PlaneWave CDK astrograph and LRGB filters.