View towards the Great Attractor

This image covers a field of 0.5° x 0.5° in the Southern constellation of Norma (The Level) and in the direction of the "Great Attractor". This region is at an angular distance of about 7° from the main plane of the Milky Way, i.e. less than 15 times the width of the image shown. In this colour composite, the foreground stars in the Milky Way mostly appear as whitish spots (the "crosses" around some of the brighter stars are caused by reflections in the telescope optics). Many background galaxies are also seen. They form a huge cluster (ACO 3627) with a number of bright galaxies near the center — they stand out by their larger size and yellowish colour. In order to facilitate transport over the Web, this image has been compressed by a factor of four from its original size (8500 x 8250 pixels). North is up and East is left.

Five exposures each were made in blue (B-band filter; 5 x 300 sec), red (R-band filter; 5 x 180 sec) and near-infrared (narrow-band filter centered at 816 nm; 5 x 240 sec) light and combined into a false-colour composite by using blue, green, and red colour for the three images, respectively. A logarithmic intensity scale is used to better show the inner as well as the outer regions of the galaxies in this field.