This is from my favorite starry website, Astronomy Picture of the Day. This is an enhanced composite shot of a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Hercules. The majority of the cluster is approximately 500 million lightyears away and 4 million light years across. When the light from many of these stars started for earth there wasn't much life on the land but the oceans were crowded with corals, molluscs, trilobites and the like. No fish, no insects, a very different earth.
This shot has so many different, wonderful things to see I broke it down into four setions. Please bear with me.
This section is great for the two spirals that appear to be merging. Hard to tell if they are, or if one is just behind the other. Our galaxy and Andromeda might look like they were merging from that far away.
Loads of spiral galaxies in various poses. And what looks like a giant yin/yang symbol in the cosmos. Oh, and the gem of a face on spiral near the yin/yang.
Upper left hand corner, two more that may be merging or just look that way because they are reletively close together. And what looks like a barred galaxy. If it's a spiral, the arms are very faint.
And the last quarter. A lot of galaxies. The one large one that is either a globular galaxy or one that tried to become a spiral and didn't make it. The bright blues in this enhanced shot are areas of star birth. So many stars, so many possibilities.
1 comment:
They are so much like looking into a microscope sometimes. "As above, so below." --Cin
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