Explanation:
These two spiral galaxies make a photogenic pair, found
within the boundaries of the northern
constellation Draco.
Contrasting in color and orientation, NGC 5965 is
nearly edge-on
to our line of sight and dominated by yellow hues, while bluish NGC 5963
is closer to face-on.
Of course, even in this
well-framed cosmic snapshot the
scene is invaded by other galaxies, including small elliptical NGC 5969
at the lower left.
Brighter, spiky stars in our own Milky Way are scattered
through the foreground.
Though they seem to be close and of similar size, galaxies NGC 5965 and
NGC 5963 are far apart and unrelated, by chance
appearing close on the sky.
NGC 5965
is about 150 million light-years distant and over 200,000
light-years across.
Much smaller, NGC 5963 is a mere 40 million light-years away
and so is not associated with the edge-on spiral.
Difficult to follow, NGC 5963's extraordinarily faint
blue spiral arms mark it
as a low surface brightness galaxy.
