Image of the day – 12

This has been nicknamed ‘The Penguin and Egg’ by some astronomers, I think it looks rather more like a hummingbird.

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What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every day (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

We have something a little different today. This has been nicknamed ‘The Penguin and Egg’ by some astronomers, I think it looks rather more like a hummingbird. But its real name is not so memorable, the penguin is NGC2936 and the egg is NGC2937. They are a pair of colliding galaxies and will eventually merge. This view comes courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope; the website is worth a visit, there are many more images like this one.

The universe we inhabit is huge. Those two galaxies are interacting, but it takes light 100 000 years to travel between them. Click the image and look closely and you’ll see dozens more galaxies in the far distance beyond this pair. We are surrounded by awesomeness!

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

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Author: Chris Jefferies

I live in the west of England, worked in IT, and previously in biological science.

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