Galactic Beauty

Graceful spiral arms, lanes of dark dust, and busy stellar nurseries highlight this Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 3344, a spiral galaxy about 20 million light-years away in the faint constellation Leo Minor. We see the galaxy almost face-on, providing a full view of its beautiful features. The nurseries are the bright red and pink blobs scattered throughout the galaxy's spiral arms. They are vast agglomerations of gas and dust that are giving birth to many new stars. Light from hot stars in the nurseries makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow reddish-pink. The galaxy is about half the diameter of the Milky Way, and is on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of hundreds of galaxies. [ESA-Hubble/NASA]