Awesome picture; funny comment: Millions of Americans voyaged what seem on Earth to be long distances to be with loved ones for the holidays. Some through bad weather and delays. And now the return migration is underway--back to homes, back to schools, back to jobs.
This is for anyone who thinks their four-hour flight is long: The light on this composite photo traveled 5,878,625,373,183 miles in one year.
Now multiply that distance times 30 million, the number of light years distance that NGC 3627 is from Earth.
That means the visible and X-ray light recorded on this page here began its journey to the lenses of the Spitzer, Hubble and Very Large Space Telescopes 30 million years ago. That´s before Larry King was born -- or even Joe Biden.

If the government had a dollar for every mile that the light traveled during that year, they could pay off the debt that the worst president in history accumulated in his first term in office. Lest you forget, that additional debt was in the 5 TRILLION dollar range.

A couple of questions for liberals: What is it about communism that you find attractive?

What will you do when the payers say "that´s it, no more"?

That´s the first place I´m going when I get to heaven.

Not true that the photons began their journey 30,000,000 years ago.
Governed by the random-walk principle, light takes about 1,000,000 years to escape from a star once its energy has been generated in the core by fusion reactions.
So, the journey averaged about 31,000,000 years, which is even before TV.

1. The image shows a galaxy with two large trailing arms, more like a "barred spiral" than the Milky Way´s conventional full spiral configuration. A barred spiral is the result of two galaxies colliding.

2. There´s not magic in most sky--object designators.
a. NGC -- New General Catalog
b. M -- Messier Objects; a list of 101 "fuzzy" points in the sky complied by the French astronomer. They are now known to be galaxies. There are a few in Orion.
c. Arp Objects -- Halton Arp´s 1966 Cal Tech catalog of "Peculiar Galaxies" has a total listing of 338 objects. A look at Arp 87 is rewarding [and a number of other Arp Objects are colliding galaxies]. Good view of galaxies trading their component stars.

IMO, I think most people haven´t a clue as to their insignificance in the universe. I love reading articles like this one, because it reminds me how small I am in the scheme of things.

So beautiful. That´s what I enjoyed in the movie Contact.