NGC 4302 and NGC 4298
From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
A member of the large Virgo Galaxy Cluster, it
spans some 87,000 light-years, a little smaller than our own Milky Way.
Like the Milky Way, NGC
4302's prominent dust lanes cut along the center of the galactic plane,
obscuring and reddening the starlight from our perspective.
Smaller companion galaxy
NGC 4298 is also a dusty spiral. But tilted more nearly face-on to our view,
NGC 4298 can show off dust lanes along spiral arms traced by the bluish light
of young stars, as well as its bright yellowish core.
In celebration of the
27th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990,
astronomers used the legendary
telescope to take this gorgeous visible light portrait of
the contrasting galaxy pair.
