Posted on 06/13/2024 11:45:28 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away. The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the Milky Way. This Hubble Space Telescope close-up view spans a region about 30,000 light-years wide around the galactic core. It shows the galaxy's disk dramatically inclined to our line-of-sight. Surrounding its bright core, the likely home of a supermassive black hole, obscuring dust lanes and young, blue star clusters sweep along spiral arms dotted with the tell-tale glow of pinkish star forming regions. Messier 66, also known as NGC 3627, is the brightest of the three galaxies in the gravitationally interacting Leo Triplet.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
Ah, the wild duck cluster in Scutum the shield
I’ve never been able to get my mind wrapped around the reason we can see what I take to be individual stars at 35 million light years away, but we can’t see a planet around a star three light years away just doesn’t make sense to me...
Mario 66
There’s no place like home...
Magnificent M66 looks like a faint smudge in my telescope. Hubble shows us how it really looks. Cool.
Scale, maybe? The smallest of stars are thousands of times larger than the largest of planets, aren't they? So planets are "seen" as their orbits transit the star on the Earth side. If the plane of the orbit isn't edge-on to Earth,
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