Spiraling Through Pavo – The Barred Beauty of IC 4682
Set against a field teeming with distant galaxies, IC 4682 stands out as a luminous barred spiral in the southern constellation Pavo. Its golden core anchors a sweeping structure of delicately curved arms, threaded with dark dust lanes and dotted with bluish patches—clear signs of active star formation.
Classified as type SBbc, this galaxy stretches about 105,000 light-years across—comparable to our Milky Way—and lies at a distance of roughly 154 million light-years. In the sky, it spans approximately 2.2 × 1.5 arcminutes, tilted on its axis in a graceful diagonal orientation. The subtle bar structure and trailing arms are especially prominent in this deep exposure.
Numerous background galaxies punctuate the image, silently reminding us of the immense scale and layered depth of the cosmos.
Imaged in LRGB on my Planewave CDK 1000 at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image acquisition and processing: Mike Selby