- Carl Crum ’24
3/4/2021 – Needle Galaxy
It’s that time of year again: Galaxy Season! From March to May, astrophotographers in northern latitudes set up their largest telescopes each night in search of the furthest and faintest deep-space wonders known to man. Captured last season, this photo is of the Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565), an edge-on galaxy located approximately 40 million light years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices. The central nucleus is somewhat bloated as a result of gravitational interactions with another galaxy. Although the Needle appears skinny and small, don’t let that deceive you: in reality, it is a massive barred-spiral galaxy which is larger and more luminous than our own Milky Way.
