Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURAImage processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

This Image of the Week of NGC 1269 was taken utilizing the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.  NGC 1269 is an early-type spiral galaxy located about 33 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. A bar, a feature common to many spiral galaxies, slices through the center of the galaxy. Surrounding the galactic core are both inner and outer disks, seeming to form ‘wheels’ around the core. Their presence is thought to be the result of a merger with another galaxy, and the inner disk is also believed to have been further shaped by density waves radiating outward from the galactic center.  Data for this image came from the archive of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), operated by the DOE and NSF between 2013 and 2019 with the specially-designed DECam. The survey sought to study the nature of the elusive dark matter by imaging hundreds of millions of galaxies. Today, the DECam is available to other scientists for use on the Blanco telescope.

Provider: NOIRLab

Image Source: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2608a/

Curator: NSF's NOIRLab, Tucson, AZ, USA

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License