NGC6822 and its rich neighborhood
About this image
A new color image of the nearby irregular galaxy NGC6822 shows a myriad of hot blue massive stars and several famous nebulae in impressive detail.
NGC6822 is located approximately 1.6 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius. A member of the Milky Way galaxy's Local Group, it was discovered by E.E. Barnard in the early 1880s. Edwin P. Hubble conducted the first detailed investigation of the galaxy in 1925, using the new 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson. An analysis of these plates by then-graduate student Susan E. Kayser in 1966 has remained the most complete study of this galaxy until now.
New images of NGC6822 in eight filters were taken using the National Science Foundation's Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) near La Serena, Chile, by CTIO staff members Knut Olsen and Chris Smith. They, along with Phil Massey [PI, Lowell Observatory], Paul Hodge (Univ Washington), Shay Holmes (Lowell Obs), George Jacoby (WIYN), Nichole King (STScI), and Abi Saha (NOAO) comprise the "Local Group Galaxies Survey Team". This color representation was put together by Travis Rector (NRAO), by combining images taken in seven of the eight filters: U (violet), B (blue), V (green), R (orange), I (red), Hydrogen-Alpha (red) and Oxygen [OIII] (blue).
The images were obtained as part of the NOAO Local Group Galaxies Survey, one of 13 active survey projects fostered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Further details can be found at http://www.lowell.edu/users/massey/lgsurvey.html.
Minimum credit line: Local Group Galaxies Survey Team/NOAO/AURA/NSF
400 x 414 53 kb color JPEG (on this page)
1024 x 1058 328 kb color JPEG
2048 x 2116 936 kb color JPEG
7748 x 8005 9.7 Mb color JPEG
7748 x 8005 60.6 Mb 8-bit color TIFF
7748 x 8005 181.8 Mb 24-bit color TIFF
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