M.I.N.I.O.N.

(via APOD: 2012 May 12 - The Hydra Cluster of Galaxies)

Two very important things about this picture:

1) Only those two really big, bright, spiky things in the foreground are individual stars. Everything else in this picture is another galaxy.

2) Those two big elliptical galaxies (NGC 3311 and NGC 3309) and the blue close-to-edge-on spiral galaxy (NGC 3312) sitting between the foreground stars are the dominant galaxies in this cluster, the Hydra Cluster.

Of additional interest might be the overlapping pair of galaxies slightly above and a bit to the left of the main spiral. They’re cataloged as NGC 3314, and the whole cluster is in Abell as 1060. Hydra is one of the larger galaxy clusters nearby (within 200 million light-years of the Milky Way) and, I’m guessing, part of the Virgo Supercluster. (The Local Group, our galaxy cluster, along with Andromeda and some others, is part of the Virgo Supercluster as well. The supercluster is named for the dominant galaxy cluster, in this case the Virgo Cluster is much, much more massive than the Local Group or the Hydra Cluster.)

Image Credit & Copyright: Angus Lau