TITLE: what is the universal cover of GL(2,R)?
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: In the theory of Bridgeland stability conditions one has an action of the universal cover $G'$ of $G = GL^+(2,\mathbb R)$.

What is G'?

I know there is concrete description in terms of pairs (M,f) with M in G and f a function (see Lemma 2.14 of Huybrechts http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.1745v2.pdf). But I'd like to know if G' is diffeomorphic to some other manifold.
At some point I convinced myself that G was actually diffeomorphic to $\mathbb C^* \times \mathbb C$ and therefore $G'$ was $\mathbb C^2$. But I've never seen this written down, so I'm getting suspicious.
EDIT: For those who have voted to close: I realize this question was very elementary. However, none of the resources on stability conditions I know of state this fact explicitly, which is quite frustrating. I think it would be very useful for people looking for a quick answer to have a place where this fact appears unambiguously.

REPLY [9 votes]: For the sake of completeness here is an explicit proof. Let $m\in GL_{2}(\mathbb{R})^{+}$, then $m\rightarrow \frac{m}{\det(m)}$ maps it to an element in $SL_{2}(\mathbb{R})$. And we know $SL_{2}(\mathbb{R})\cong \mathbb{R}^2\times \mathbb{S}^1$ via appropriate parametrization. Thus $GL_{2}(\mathbb{R})^{+}\cong \mathbb{R}^{+}\times \mathbb{R}^{2}\times \mathbb{S}^1\cong \mathbb{R}^{3}\times \mathbb{S}^1$ as a manifold. And its universal cover is $\mathbb{R}^4$. 
It might be overkill, but I think others were alluding to Iwasawa decomposition.