NGC 4244, nicknamed the Silver Needle Galaxy is my next image. This galaxy spans some 65,000 light-years and lies around 13.5 million light-years away. It appears as a wafer-thin streak across the sky, with its loosely wound spiral arms hidden from view as we observe the galaxy side-on.

Numerous bright clumps of gas can be seen scattered across its length, along with dark dust lanes surrounding the galaxy’s core. NGC 4244 also has a bright star cluster at its centre. Although we can make out the galaxy’s bright central region and star-spattered arms, we cannot see any more intricate structure due to the galaxy’s position; from Earth, we see it stretched out as a flattened streak across the sky.

I could not get the color to really balance correctly. The galaxy is more yellowish and less greenish that what shows.

Took this image over 10.5 hours (18 images of 20 minutes each for Luminance and 9 images each of red, blue and green colors of 10 minutes each).