NASA has released a live image of a hidden galaxy located near the Milky Way’s pearly disk’s equator. The spiral galaxy IC 342, also known as Caldwell 5, is located approximately 11 million light-years from Earth and was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Caldwell 5, discovered in the early 1890s, is obscured by so much interstellar matter that it is difficult to locate in the sky. The Hidden Galaxy got its name because of this.

The latest Hubble image shows a gleaming, face-on view of the galaxy’s core, which features intertwined dust tendrils in spectacular arms that wrap around a brilliant core of hot gas and stars. According to NASA, this core is a type of region known as a H II nucleus, which is an ionised area of atomic hydrogen. Thousands of stars can form in these energetic birthplaces of stars over the course of a few million years.

Caldwell 5 can be seen with a telescope in the Northern Hemisphere’s clear night sky during late autumn and early winter. Only those living near the equator in the Southern Hemisphere will be able to see it low in the northern sky during late spring or early summer.

NASA and the European Space Agency collaborated on the Hubble Space Telescope as an international project (ESA). Since its launch on April 24, 1990, the space-based observatory has made over 1.5 million observations of about 50,000 celestial objects, and astronomers have published over 19,000 scientific papers using Hubble data.