Milky Way's Big Brother (NGC 6744)

Milky Way's Big Brother (NGC 6744)

This beautiful spiral galaxy might be what our Milky Way Galaxy looks like from a far-away distance!

It is deemed a sibling of the Milky Way for their striking resemblance. Both galaxies have elongated yellowish cores where old stars dominate; both have dusty spiral arms filled with young blue stars and active star-forming regions; both have small companion galaxies (the smudge on the top-left corner)…

It is 30 million light-years away but extremely massive (nearly 200,000 light-years across). On our night sky, that's almost as large as the full moon!

Could there also be intelligent beings observing the universe, pondering what their galaxy might look like to us?

(The data behind this image was from Telescopelive, which I processed using Pixinsight and Photoshop)