Hubble time! 🌌 This picture zooms in on the feathery spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 45, which lies just 22 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale). The data used to create this portrait were drawn from two complementary observing programmes. The first took a broad view of 50 nearby galaxies, leveraging Hubble’s ability to observe light from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared in order to study star formation in these galaxies. The second programme examined many of the same nearby galaxies as the first, narrowing in on a particular wavelength of red light called H-alpha. Star-forming nebulae are powerful producers of H-alpha light, and several of these regions can be identified across NGC 45 by their bright pink-red colour. These observing programmes aimed to study star formation in galaxies of different sizes, structures, and degrees of isolation — and NGC 45 makes for a particularly interesting target. Though it may appear to be a regular spiral galaxy, NGC...