Many people are familiar with the Leo Triplet of galaxies, M65, M66 and NGC 3628. In the Southern skies there’s a similar formation in the constellation Pavo of NGCs 6769, 6970 & 6971 at a distance of 190 million light years. All three galaxies are interacting and whilst the cores consist of elderly reddish stars the spiral arms are lit up with clumps of new stars formed by the gravitation interactions.
Many other members of the Pavo galaxy group are also visible in this picture.
This image was obtained with GRAS-008 and is a composite of 10x 5 minute exposures. The image has ben scaled down by a factor of 3 for display on this blog.