NGC 891 — The Silver Sliver Galaxy
Captured with: Seestar S50 Smart Telescope
Distance: ~30 million light-years
Constellation: Andromeda
Type: Edge-On Spiral Galaxy (SA(s)b)
Apparent Size: ~13 x 2.8 arcminutes
NGC 891 slices across the night sky like a cosmic blade — a perfectly edge-on spiral galaxy whose dusty midplane divides a faint halo of starlight. Lying some 30 million light-years away, it offers a striking preview of what our own Milky Way might look like from the side.
Through the Seestar S50, the galaxy’s dark dust lane is clearly visible — a river of interstellar soot composed of carbon, silicates, and ice grains. It obscures the bright central bulge while tracing the thin disk where new stars are born. Surrounding this plane, faint tendrils of light hint at gas and stars ejected above the disk by ancient stellar explosions.
Seen edge-on, NGC 891 reveals the layered anatomy of a spiral galaxy — the thin star-forming disk, the glowing bulge of old suns, and the extended halo that cradles it all in gravity’s embrace.
The Silver Sliver Galaxy is a quiet reflection of our own cosmic home: fragile, immense, and drifting through the dark, its billions of stars threading the universe like a luminous seam in space-time.