The viewing angle actually makes a big difference to what we can learn about a galaxy.
The discs of spiral galaxies are utterly lovely things to behold, and we can learn a lot about their structure and how they form by looking at them from the flat side, or on an oblique angle. But, as a new image released by the European Southern Observatory attests, you can also learn a lot by looking at them from the side — and they’re gorgeous from any angle.
This is NGC 1055 , a spiral galaxy located some 55 million light-years away in the large northern hemisphere constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).
