Beauty on a large scale

I just came across a spectacular photo created at the Paranal Obser- vatory in Chile. This is the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, photo- graphed in infrared light.  NGC 1365 is a member of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, which is a mere 60 million light-years from Earth. 60 million light-years! The immensity of that distance is cause for great marvel. It also makes me feel, perhaps, a little helpless: we'll never get there! It turns out the Milky Way may be a barred spirall also. NGC 1365 is 200,000 light years in diameter! That makes it much bigger than our milky way. The complete story is here.