Picture of the Day: NGC 2841's Majestic Disk of Stars and Dust

Hidden inside of the night sky's Big Dipper, a constellation we've all known how to locate since elementary school, is NGC 2841, a spiral galaxy about 46 million light-years away from us. Captured here by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 2841 is described as a "majestic disk of stars and dust lanes."

"A bright cusp of starlight marks the galaxy's center," NASA explained. "Spiraling outward are dust lanes that are silhouetted against the population of whitish middle-aged stars. Much younger blue stars trace the spiral arms."

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Image: NASA.