NGC 6217, Hubble Space Telescope

 NGC 6217 : Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in this image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. NGC 6217 has been characterized as a starburst galaxy which means it is undergoing a high rate of star formation compared to a typical galaxy. As a result, the spectrum is dominated by stellar ionization from young, hot stars. This component is less than 10 million years old, producing a blue-hued spectral continuum. Light takes about 67 million years to reach us from NGC 6217, which spans about 30,000 light years across and can be found toward the constellation of the Little Bear(Ursa Minor). The raw data for this image was taken by the Hubble telescope in July 2009  and the processing was done by Michael Adler in 2022. This is a true color image with the color resulting from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image taken through various filters. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: from a 435nm broadband filter, Green: 625nm filter, Red: 814nm filter, and red highlights from Hydrogen and Nitrogen emission from a narrowband 658nm filter.