Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2021

JULY-AUGUST 2021 from Earth, meaning that we can observe its spiral structure in fantastic detail. The galaxy lies around 15 million light-years away, which makes it a neighbor in astronomical terms. It has a diameter of around 50,000 light-years, so it is a little diminutive in comparison to our O ne of the deepest images ever taken of the Southern Pinwheel (combining more than 11 hours of exposure time), this view was captured with the Dark Energy Cam- era (DECam), which was built by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. Numerous background galaxies, which lie much far- ther away than Messier 83, appear around the edges of the image. [CTIO/NOIRLab/ DOE/NSF/AURA - Ack: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois) - Image processing: Travis Rec- tor (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin]