Daily Telescope: The ambiguously galactic duo

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's April 23, and today's photo comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. It features a lovely, barred spiral galaxy and a photobombing star on the right-hand side of the image.

The galaxy is NGC 3783, which can be found 130 million light years away from Earth. Astronomical distances are all mind-boggling, but to try and put things into perspective, that means this galaxy is about 1,000 times the distance further from us compared to the diameter of our own Milky ...