The gorgeous Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

image courtesy ESO

The European Southern Observatory released a gorgeous image of the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, or Messier 83. At about 40,000 light years across, it’s about 2.5 times smaller than the Milky Way, but apart from the smaller size, it’s a good proxy for what our own galaxy might look like.

The picture was taken by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) attached to a 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla, in the Chilean Andes.