May - A sky full of galaxies

This image contains a plethora of astronomical treats. A subtle grouping of 1000 yellowish galaxies cluster together near the centre of the frame.Combined with large quantities of hot gas and dark matter, the galaxy cluster weighs more than 100 billion times the mass of the Sun. At the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud, these galaxies are observed amongst many other clusters of hundreds of thousands of giant stars. Observations were taken by the 67-million-pixel Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. The data to create this image were selected from the ESO archive for the Hidden Treasures competition.