Galaxies are gravitationally bound aggregations of billions of stars, dust and gas. Apart from the stars of our own galaxy (the Milky Way), galaxies are the most common type of deep sky object. Galaxies are also very distant and are far outside the confines of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Because even the nearest galaxy (the Andromeda Galaxy) is nearly 3 million light years distant, galaxies are faint and small and most offer only limited visual detail, even in the largest of amateur telescopes. Thus the reason for photography. With the use of film or CCD cameras, such as are used to image the objects on the site, amateurs with relatively small aperture telescopes can image what the eye cannot see. The galaxies shown on this page range from 3 million to 400 million light years distant - that is, the light from the galaxies shown below took up to 400 million years to reach my telescope and camera. Thus, the objects depicted here appear as they existed millions of years ago. To look at these images is to look millions of years into the past. Galaxies come in five basic varieties; spiral (barred and non-barred types), elliptical, lenticular, irregular, and peculiar. Most of the galaxies shown above are of the spiral variety.
