Hubble captures image of 'hidden galaxy'

July 7 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope captured the IC 342, a challenging space target due to its thick glowing gas, dark, bright stars and obscuring dust.

The IC 342, also known as the Hidden Galaxy, sits near the equator in the Milky Way's galactic disk, where the haze of glowing cosmic gas, dark, obscuring dust and bright stars was captured in an image released by NASA on Friday.

Scientists had to look through a large amount of material contained within our own galaxy to view the intricate spiral structure of IC 342.

IC 342 gets its name of the Hidden Galaxy because of difficulty viewing it, and it would be among the brightest galaxies in the sky if it wasn't obscured by cosmic dust.

The very active galaxy is a mixture of hot, blue star-forming regions, redder, cooler regions of gas, and dark lanes of opaque dust swirling together around a bright core known as the Hill nucleus.