The best galaxy pair yet…

Fresh off the telescope, I wanted to share with you this spectacular spiral-spiral pair. Both of these galaxies probably look alike, but we’re seeing one edge on, and the other face on. (The bright thing on the left is a star, surrounded by reflections we haven’t had time to remove yet). The bright knots you can see in the face-on galaxy are likely to be bright star clusters, probably of young stars. Not only does this system look good, though, it’s pretty much ideal for our project. The edge on galaxy is clearly behind its face on neighbour (and these two are close together), whose spiral arms run in front of it. It’s also nice and smooth, so we can predict what light will hit the nearer galaxy – and use that to deduce its dust properties.