Mar 18
IC 5332 // Rick Veregin & Brian Diaz
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from United States
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from France
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Paraguay
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Georgia
seen from Algeria
seen from Russia
seen from Ukraine
IC 5332 // Rick Veregin & Brian Diaz
Weakly Barred Spiral
IC 5332 // Jochen Maes
IC 5332 // jhawn
Intricate Infrared Spiral
Detailed Spiral Pattern
Hubble Captures a Galaxy Face-On
This glittering image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy IC 5332. The galaxy lies about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor and has an almost face-on orientation to Earth. To understand the term ‘face-on,’ it is helpful to visualize a spiral galaxy as an extremely large disk. If the galaxy’s orientation makes it appear circular and disk-shaped from our perspective on Earth, then we say that it is ‘face-on.’ In contrast, if the galaxy’s orientation is such that it appears squashed and oval-shaped, then we say that it is ‘edge-on.’ The key thing is that the same galaxy would look extremely different from our perspective depending on whether it was face-on or edge-on as seen from Earth.