Triangulum Galaxy

Under an inky sky, far from any city, a trained eye can just make it out: a small milky smudge in the constellation of Triangulum. Many will never see it, and yet it is a whole galaxy, one of the most distant within reach of the unaided eye. Its light travelled nearly 3 million years before reaching your retina.

This is the Triangulum Galaxy, one of our closest neighbours. Together with our Milky Way and the great Andromeda Galaxy, it forms the Local Group, the small family of galaxies we belong to. More modest than its two big sisters, it faces us almost perfectly and spreads out its spiral arms, strewn with young blue stars and pink clouds of hydrogen.

One of those pink patches is worth pausing on: NGC 604, a stellar nursery so gigantic that it dwarfs the great Orion Nebula, itself already immense. More than two hundred massive stars are being born there together, and their light makes the surrounding gas glow. A whole galaxy, and already, inside it, worlds in the making.