The Slow Dance of Galaxies NGC 5394 and 5395
If you like slow dances , then this may be one for you. A single turn in this dance takes several hundred million years . Two galaxies, NGC 5394 and NGC 5395, slowly whirl about each other in a gravitational interaction that sets off a flourish of sparks in the form of new stars . The featured image, taken with the Gemini North 8-meter telescope on Maunakea , Hawaii , USA , combines four different colors . Emission from hydrogen gas , colored red, marks stellar nurseries where new stars drive the evolution of the galaxies . Also visible are dark dust lanes that mark gas that will eventually become stellar nurseries . If you look carefully you will see many more galaxies in the background , some involved in their own slow cosmic dance s. APOD across world languages: Arabic , Catalan , Chinese (Beijing), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian , Czech , Dutch , Farsi , French , French , German , Hebrew , Indonesian , Japanese , Korean , Montenegrin , Polish , Russian , Serbian , Slovenian , Spanish and Ukrainian