APOD 1.8

Todays APOD is from the actual APOD site today because the government is back in business! It is taken from October 16th and is a picture of Draco the constellation.

It is actually a very close up view of it and shows the three galaxies that are within Draco from our point of view from Earth. This group of galaxies is called the Draco Group and is found in the upper right corner of the constellation. The galaxies are called (from right to left) are edge on spiral NGC5981, elliptical galaxy NGC5982, and face on spiral NGC5985. The coolest thing is that this is taken in one telescopic view that is only a little bigger than half of the full moon which tells you just how close these are to each other from our point of view. These galaxies are all about 100 light years away from us. If you look closely enough, you can see that a lot of the stars in the background are actually more galaxies that are just tinier from us as they are further away. I chose this picture not only because it looked cool, but also because it seemed appropriate that I did a picture on a relevant topic in our class. We just took a constellation quiz where one of the two new constellations was Draco!