NGC 3314 consists of two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line-up.
The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters.
But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust are also seen to echo the face-on spiral's structure.
The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of visible light can be used to directly explore the distribution of dust in distant spirals.
