images

Spiral galaxy NGC 3949 in Ursa Major

by

NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/Novapix

Reference

a-gax39-49001

Date

2006-09-11

Like our Milky Way, this galaxy has a blue disk of young stars peppered with bright pink star-birth regions. In contrast to the blue disk, the bright central bulge is made up of mostly older, redder stars. NGC 3949 lies about 50 million light-years from Earth. It is a member of a loose cluster of some six or seven dozens of galaxies located in the direction of the Big Dipper, in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). It is one of the larger galaxies of this cluster. This image was created from Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in October 2001. Separate exposures through blue, visible, and near-infrared filters have been combined to make the natural color picture.