Located a mind-numbing 350 quintillion kilometers away -- 35 million light years, a mere stone's throw on a cosmic scale -- the Leo Triplet is a set of three interacting spiral galaxies, each much like our own Milky Way. It's unusual for a professional observatory to get all three in the same image, but the 2.6 meter VLT Survey Telescope (VST) has a 268 megapixel camera, making it a snap to take a family portrait:
[Click to massively galactinate.] How flipping awesome is that? This is one of those times I wish I could inlay a picture wider than 610 pixels; you really want to grab the hi-res version. This incredible picture is a combination of green, red, and near-infrared filtered images (displayed a bit confusingly as magenta, green, and red respectively in the image above). The three galaxies are all spirals at varying degrees of tilt: M 66 at ...
