A cosmic study in contrasts: a blue spiral alive with star formation set against a quiet giant that has long since aged.
NGC 7162 sits in the constellation Indus, showing off its tightly wound spiral structure against a crowded background of faint galaxies. This grand design spiral galaxy is located about 120 million light years away, stretching some 80,000 light years across. Its arms reveal bright star-forming knots, narrow dust lanes that slice through the light, and scattered magenta Hα patches — glowing clouds of ionized hydrogen that mark where new stars are being born. A faint little knot showing through the outer arm at the top right is almost certainly a background galaxy seen in projection, a reminder of how deep the view really goes.
Sharing the field is the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 7166, seen to the lower left, glowing with a broad, diffuse halo of older stars. NGC 7166 lies at a similar distance of around 120 million light years, but it dwarfs its spiral neighbor in scale, spanning nearly 140,000 light years. Together they anchor the NGC 7162 group, a gathering of galaxies bound by gravity. The contrast is striking — one galaxy still actively weaving stars from dust and gas, the other long past that stage, its light a uniform glow from an ancient stellar population.
All around them, countless tiny background galaxies peek through, a reminder that even this group is only a small patch in a universe filled with structures far beyond.
It’s like looking at youth and age side by side, two very different outcomes written in starlight.
Imaged in LRGB on my Planewave CDK 1000 at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image acquisition and processing: Mike Selby