NGC 4731

 A Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4731 lies some 65 million light-years away. The lovely island universe resides in the large Virgo cluster of galaxies. Colors in this well-composed, cosmic portrait shows many young, bluish star clusters along the galaxy's sweeping spiral arms. Its broad arms are distorted by gravitational interaction with a fellow Virgo cluster member, giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4697. NGC 4697 is beyond this frame above and to the left.

The field is littered with many galaxies and clusters of galaxies as well.

Of course, the individual, colorful, spiky stars in the scene are much closer, within our own Milky Way galaxy. NGC 4731 itself is well over 100,000 light-years across.

Imaged in LRGB and H alpha at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile. Planewave CDK 1000

Image Processing: Mark Hanson

Data and Preprocessing: Mike Selby

Enjoy, Mark