The Hidden Galaxy certainly lives up to its name, hiding behind a dense region of the Milky Way near the galactic equator in the constellation of Camelopardalis. IC 342 is only around 11 million light years away and has an apparent diameter of about 21 arcminutes, making it the third largest galaxy in angular size visible from Earth, after The Andromeda Galaxy and The Triangulum Galaxy. If it wasn't for all that gas, dust and the myriad of stars of our galaxy in the way, it would be a spectacular sight in the night sky. It is estimated that it suffers from an extinction of about 2.4 magnitudes and as such, it can only just be observed through binoculars. Even with larger instruments it proves difficult to discern much detail.

This long exposure image manages to pick up detail through the gas and dust and the shape of the galaxy emerges, with its large sweeping spiral arms clearly visible. It is even just possible to make out some of the galaxies own nebulae, residing in the spiral arms. However, it remains an unusual galaxy image thanks to the multitude of stars visible across the field and over the disk of the galaxy.

IC 342 is an intermediate spiral galaxy. The 'intermediate' classification means that the central core of the galaxy is around halfway between a bar and a sphere. The Hidden Galaxy was first discovered by William Frederick Denning in 1895. He thought it was a galactic nebula (a nebula in the Milky Way) and it was only through the combined effort of Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in 1934 that the spiral nature of it was discovered and it was identified as a spiral galaxy outside the Milky Way.

It is thought that the Hidden Galaxy has experienced lots of star formation activity relatively recently and its gravitational forces will have affected the evolution of nearby galaxies, perhaps even the Milky Way. Due to its large apparent diameter, Hubble first thought the galaxy was part of the Local Group, which is a group of galaxies that are relatively close to the Milky Way, but it has since been determined that this is not the case.