Located in the southern sky along the Hydra/Centaurus border, Messier 83 is a fine example of a nearly face-on spiral galaxy much like our very own Milky Way. Many professional astronomers even believe the Milky Way to have a weak bar-like structure extending from its central bulge just as seen in the image above. The darkened lanes of dust spiraling outward from the bright core along with the many pinkish "knots" of nebulosity make it quite obvious that vigorous star-formation is still occuring within M 83. Though it is inclined merely 24 degrees from being perfectly face-on from our line of sight, the disc of this galaxy appears to be somewhat twisted. Furthermore, recent studies of the object in nonvisible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum have revealed what is known as "starburst" activity near the dense galactic core. Such observations have led some speculation that M 83 may have literally absorbed a small neighboring galaxy at some time during its past. Another point of interest is the faint extended halo seen surrounding the galaxy in the image above. While processing this image, I found the apparent diameter of M 83 extending well beyond the typically reported size of about 13 arc-minutes. As it turns out, observations reported in 1981 found that this object actually has an immense envelope of molecular gas spanning some 1.5 degrees of sky. At an estimated distance of ~25 million light years, this translates to an actual physical diameter of more than six times that of our Milky Way Galaxy! Image taken with homemade 8-inch f/5.4 astrograph and SBIG STL-11000M. LRGB image composed of 30 minutes each of R,G,B and 100 minutes L. Please click on the above image for the high resolution version inwhich a myriad of tiny background galaxies become visible.