Explanation:
When morning twilight came to the
Paranal Observatory in Chile,
astronomers Mark Neeser and Peter Barthel interrupted their
search for faintquasars, billions of
light-years away.
And just for a moment, they used
Very Large Telescopes
at the European Southern Observatory to appreciate the beauty of
the nearby Universe.
One result was
this stunning view
of beautiful spiral galaxy M66,
a mere 35 million light-years away.
About 100 thousand light-years across with striking dust lanes
and bright star clusters along sweeping spiral arms,
M66 is well known to astronomers as a
member of the Leo Triplet
of galaxies.
Gravitational interactions with its
neighborhood
galaxies
have likely influenced the shape of dusty spiral M66.
