IRAS 18293-3413 (2014)

This is a very dusty spiral galaxy situated toward the plane of the Milky Way. Many local stars dot the foreground while the galaxy glows strongly in infrared, which is represented by a red color here. Widefield ACS imagery covers most of the scene in two bands while the galaxy itself has an additional third band contributed by NICMOS.

Looking at this galaxy in AllWISE color, it glows conspicuously in the 12 micron range indicating a large amount of warm dust. Looking at the Hubble imagery it is easy to see why that is. It is indeed immensely dusty.

There is an elliptical galaxy that appears to be touching the spiral galaxy at its northwest edge but if I had to guess I would say that it is in the distance behind the spiral, given the lack of perturbation that gravitational interactions would cause if the elliptical were closer.

Some much more distant galaxies are also visible as faint and small orange smudges.

Data from two proposals were used to create this image.
11235: HST NICMOS Survey of the Nuclear Regions of Luminous Infrared Galaxies in the Local Universe
10592: An ACS Survey of a Complete Sample of Luminous Infrared Galaxies in the Local Universe

Red: HST_10592_69_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Red (Galaxy only): HST_11235_51_NIC_NIC2_F160W_sci + HST_10592_69_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_10592_69_ACS_WFC_F435W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 2.5° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.