NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove, according to the agency's Oct. 16, 2026 release. Rusty-brown dust lanes bisect the galaxy lengthwise, while distant galaxies and foreground stars, marked by diffraction spikes, appear against the black background.

Hubble took the image with its Advanced Camera for Surveys as part of a survey of 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of about 32 million light-years from Earth. According to NASA, Hubble has already observed 111 of these satellite galaxies; the remaining ones will require an additional 149 Hubble orbits, one per galaxy.

The image shows bright-blue regions along the galaxy's disk dotted with dark dust lanes where new stars are likely forming. A bright foreground star sits just left of the galaxy's central bulge, between Hubble and the galaxy, and its four diffraction spikes result from light bending around the supports holding Hubble's secondary mirror. NASA says low-mass galaxies in the program offer a way to test cosmological models on small scales, which struggle to match observations, and that the data will help researchers characterize such galaxies and refine those models.