M64 The Blackeye Galaxy

It started out so clear and nice...so knowing that I would be throwing out half of the shots I took (I haven't fixed the drive error yet) I decided to do this anyway. Well, I went out to later collect the pictures only to be greeted by clouds...so this picture is only about 29 minutes of total exposure.

Other than that weird black band of dust, M64 looks to be a fairly normal spiral galaxy, but that dust is a tip-off that something isn't quite right here. Most of the stars are orbiting the galactic core in the same direction, as expected. But most of the gas, and the stars in the outer reaches of the galactic disk are orbiting the other-it's actually two spirals that have recently collided and merged. When that happens, all the diffuse dust and gas can get scrunched up and condense into dust clouds, as has happened here. It may look dark in visible wavelengths, but an infrared picture shows that as those dust clouds condense they start giving rise to new stars, often some of the largest, hottest, and shortest-lived stars of all. Infrared light does not pass through our atmosphere very well, but this image from Hubble shows how hot the stars actually are in that dark cloud.