The classic spiral Messier 83 seen in the infrared with HAWK-I

This image of the nearby galaxy Messier 83 was taken in the infrared part of the spectrum with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The very fine image quality of this camera, coupled with the huge light-collecting power of the VLT, reveals vast numbers of stars within the galaxy. The images were taken in three different parts of the infrared spectrum and the total exposure time was eight and a half hours, split into more than five hundred exposures of one minute each. The field of view is about 13 arcminutes across.