NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a sparkling blue galaxy, classified as ESO 300-16, located 28.7 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. The hazy, ghostly assemblage of stars resemble a sparkling cloud, while a gallery of distant galaxies and foreground stars complete this astronomical portrait.
This image is just one of a series that aim to familiarize astronomers with our galactic neighbors, as approximately three quarters of the known galaxies are suspected to lie within 10 megaparsecs of Earth. These known galaxies have been observed by Hubble in enough detail to resolve their brightest stars and establish the distances to them.
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The motion of Earth around the Sun means that stars appear to slightly shift against very distant stars over the course of a year. This small shift is referred to as parallax and is measured in angular units: degrees, minutes, and seconds. One parsec is equivalent to saying a parallax of one-arcsecond, and is equivalent to 3.26 light-years or 30.9 trillion kilometers,” said the ESA.
