Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217
Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar . Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, featured here , was captured in spectacular detail in this image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes , young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole . Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 6217 , which spans about 30,000 light years across and can be found toward the constellation of the Little Bear ( Ursa Minor ). APOD in world languages: Arabic , Bulgarian , Catalan , Chinese (Beijing), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian , Czech , Dutch , French , French (Canada), German , Hebrew , Indonesian , Japanese , Korean , Montenegrin , Polish , Russian , Serbian , Slovenian , Spanish , Taiwanese , Turkish , Turkish , and Ukrainian