Feb 25
The Giant Elliptical Galaxy NGC 4406 ©
seen from Italy
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seen from United States
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The Giant Elliptical Galaxy NGC 4406 ©
The Perseus Cluster, Abell 426 // Michal Wierzbinski
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies - December 13th, 1997.
"Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies house billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big, it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other! Most galaxies in Coma and other clusters are ellipticals, while most galaxies outside of clusters are spirals."
Margaret Nazon — Galaxy Cluster [velvet with beading (glass, plastic and organic material), canvas backing, 2016]
Progress flag colorpicked from MACS 0416 galaxy cluster with gravitationally lensed star Mothra
Galaxy cluster Abell 2813 image from JWST NIRCam (filters: F277W, F356W, F444W) with lots of bright gravitational lenses
The Hydra Cluster of Galaxies
Astronomy Picture of the Day
2026 June 5
The Hydra Cluster of Galaxies
Image Credit & Copyright: Rafael Sampaio
Explanation: Within our own Milky Way galaxy, two bright, spiky stars stand like sentinels in the foreground of this cosmic snapshot. Far beyond them are the galaxies of the Hydra Cluster. In fact, while the spiky foreground stars are hundreds of light-years distant, the Hydra Cluster galaxies are well over 100 million light-years away. Three large galaxies near the cluster center, two yellow ellipticals (NGC 3311, NGC 3309) and one prominent blue spiral (NGC 3312), are the dominant galaxies, each about 150,000 light-years in diameter. An intriguing overlapping galaxy pair cataloged as NGC 3314 lies above and left of NGC 3312. Also known as Abell 1060, the Hydra galaxy cluster is one of three large galaxy clusters within 200 million light-years of the Milky Way. In the nearby universe, galaxies are gravitationally bound into clusters which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters. Superclusters in turn are seen to align over even larger scales.
Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Amber Straughn
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
NASA Science Activation
& Michigan Tech. U.