Spiral Galaxy M74

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby spiral galaxy M74 is an iconic reminder of the impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation.

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a "grand-design" spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths. Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy's nucleus and follow along the length of the spiral arms.

M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces, the Fish. It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our Milky Way.

The spiral galaxy was first discovered by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1780. Weeks later it was added to Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep-sky objects.

This Hubble image of M74 is a composite of Advanced Camera for Surveys data taken in 2003 and 2005. The filters used to create the color image isolate light from blue, visible, and infrared portions of the spectrum, as well as emission from ionized hydrogen (known as HII regions).

A small segment of this image used data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Gemini Observatory to fill in a region that Hubble did not image.

About the colours

This image is a composite of many separate exposures made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Three filters were used to sample broad wavelength ranges, while one filter was used to sample a narrow wavelength band. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F435W (B) Green: F555W (V) Red: F656N (Halpha + [N II]) + F814 (I)

About the data

The Hubble image was created from HST data from proposals: 10402 : R. Chandar (University of Toledo), B. Whitmore (STScI), R. Kennicutt Jr. (University of Cambridge), L. Bianchi (Johns Hopkins University), D. Calzetti (University of Massachusetts), D. Elmegreen (Vassar College), B. Elmegreen (IBM/T.J. Watson Research Center), M. Regan (STScI), S. Larsen (European Southern Observatory, Germany), and J. Brodie (University of California, Santa Cruz) 9796 : J. Miller (University of Michigan), G. Fabbiano and A. Zezas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), P. Kaaret (University of Iowa), J. Grindlay (Harvard University), A. Kong (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A. King (University of Leicester), M. Ward (University of Durham), V. Kalogera (Northwestern University), M. Krauss (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and M. Garcia (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)