• Question: what would you say is your favourite galaxy and why?

    Asked by howfaram1 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      The Milky way! I like the malty middle bit 🙂

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I like the Andromeda galaxy, because we can see it all from Earth.

      If you get a telescope and a camera, and point it at the right bit of sky for long enough, then you can see the sausage shape of a spiral galaxy like ours with a bright bulge in the middle. Just in that blurry bit of sky, there are 400 billion stars!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Oooh tough one for me – there’s so many great ones.

      I’m loving Andromeda at the moment, because I’m in the middle of making another short video like this one (http://vimeo.com/20951068) in which I talk about looking at galaxies with all different kinds of telescopes which detect different kids of light (like radio, optical, x-ray etc). I’m illustrating this using lots of pictures of Andromeda from different telescopes – and they are really really pretty.

      I have pictures of galaxies in my ofice, and I picked the tadpole galaxy and the black eye galaxy.

      I also really think Hoag’s object is interesting. I blogged about that once: http://thebeautifulstars.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-is-hoags-object.html

      But normally I work with lots of galaxies at once and try to understand them as a population as a whole . One of my first research projects as a PhD student worked with 15,000 galaxies for example.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Ooh, probably our galaxy because it is the only one we can see with our eyes: the Milky Way. (Which makes me think of the chocolate, so I usually get hungry soon afterwards.)

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