The image, released yesterday, actually contains two spirals
overlain on each other. One is the cloudy, blue-white spiral
with a yellow core. The core itself is a composite of images
take by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for
Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2
detectors. Spiraling outward, the cloudy arms also come from
Hubble, but were colorized with ground-based images captured
from relatively small telescopes (12.5-inch and 20-inch) as they
imaged from dark, remote sites in New Mexico. The telescopes,
owned by photo-astronomers Robert Gendler and R. Jay GaBany,
helped these astronomy enthusiasts fill in gaps left by Hubble’s
cameras. The images were meticulously assembled into a mosaic by
Gendler, a physician by training, to form the base spiral of the
photo illustration above But what about the second spiral?
Emanating at odd angles is a glowing red swirl, known as the
“anomalous arms” of M106, These arms, captured by Hubble imagery
and GaBany’s telescope, are en