DES-photo-essay-1-noirlab2107a

The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 83 or NGC 5236) is about 15 million lightyears from Earth. It took DECam more than 11 hours of exposure time to capture this image. The camera is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

Photo: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA

Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois)
Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani and Davide de Martin