Galaxies come in a lot of flavors. And even in the major categories (spiral, elliptical) there are sub-flavors... like barred spirals, which are truly cool and weird and awesome. Behold!
Yowza. Click to engalacticate. That's NGC 1365, a barred spiral about 60 million light years away in the Fornax cluster, as seen by the HAWK-1 camera on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. HAWK-1 is sensitive to infrared light, from just outside our human eye's range to wavelengths about four times longer than we can see. Those wavelengths are pretty good (though not perfect) at penetrating dust clouds in galaxies, which block visible light. So mostly what you see in images like this one is light from stars, along with gas clouds. Where you see dark lanes is where the dust is so thick it blocks even the infrared light, too. The two major spiral arms are obvious enough, as ...
