I decided to take a break from capturing planetary nebula. With the winter months in Michigan in my backyard I do not get many clear nights, but tried to go deep on NGC 1569; a dwarf irregular galaxy. While this does not compare with the Hubble version, I believe I was able to pull out more detail than any other amateur astronomer, which was my goal.

NGC 1569 is a dwarf irregular galaxy in Camelopardalis. The galaxy is relatively nearby and consequently, the Hubble Space Telescope can easily resolve the stars within the galaxy. The distance to the galaxy was previously believed to be only 2.4 Mpc (7.8 Mly). However, in 2008 scientists studying images from Hubble calculated the galaxy's distance at nearly 11 million light-years away, about 4 million light-years farther than previously thought, meaning it is a member of the IC 342 group of galaxies.

NGC 1569 is characterized by a large starburst. It has formed stars at a rate 100 times greater than that of the Milky Way during the last 100 million years. It contains two prominent super star clusters with different histories. Both clusters have experienced episodic star formation. Super star cluster A, located in the northwest of the galaxy and actually formed of two close clusters (NGC 1569 A1 and NGC 1569 A2), contains young stars (including Wolf-Rayet stars) that formed less than 5 million years ago (in NGC 1569 A1) as well as older red stars (in NGC 1569 A2). Super star cluster B, located near the center of the galaxy, contains an older stellar population of red giants and red supergiants. Both of these star clusters are thought to have masses equivalent to the masses of the globular clusters in the Milky Way (approximately (6-7) × 105 solar masses). Numerous smaller star clusters, some of them having masses similar to those of small globular clusters or R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, with relatively young ages (between 2 million years and 1 billion years) have also been identified. These results, along with the results from other dwarf galaxies such as the Large Magellanic Cloud and NGC 1705, demonstrate that star formation in dwarf galaxies does not occur continuously but instead occurs in a series of short, nearly instantaneous bursts.