Galaxy Zoo Wallpapers

Triple Threat
A trio of modest galaxies, an edge on spiral, an open oblique spiral, and an elliptical, make a nice "crowded sky" wallpaper. The edge on spiral of this trio of visually neighboring galaxies has a little blob above it and a rakish angle that makes it look exactly like a flying saucer driven by an alien with his head out the hatch.

Another Three'fer
A long elliptical or possible edge on spiral, and two fairly fuzzy blue spirals make a vertical arrangement. This isn't very pretty, but is another example of just how visually dense the universe can be with galaxies.

Shot from Guns
This modest yellow spiral galaxy seems to have developed a way to shoot a line of stars or small galaxies out of itself.

Star on Wedgie Both Blue
A long narrow blue elliptical galaxy superposed by a blue star seems to be budding an offspring.

Lumpy Elliptical
This is one of the elliptical galaxies, blue in this case, with so much internal structure that the classifier's eye tries hard to manufacturing some spiraling in it somewhere to explain the dense clusters of stars.

Two Turn Two Arm Spiral with big blue stars nearby
This very attractive galaxy, mostly white, has a simple structure with long skinny arms much like a brittle starfish in the ocean does. Nearby large stars show just how tiny most of the galaxies seen even at this level of detail really loom in the sky.

Yellow-White Train Wreck with long tail
Two galaxies in collision seem to have hit each other at a very acute angle, leaving a trail of ripped away stars behind them almost larger than the two galaxies' lengths combined.

Possible Merger Or Jet Makes Tail Of Stars
The reason this galaxy is squirting out stars like a spaceship with an aircraft contrail behind it isn't really obvious, making it perhaps an interesting object for further study.

Elliptical Outline Embedded Spiral Arms
This pretty galaxy violates the naive expectation that there will be some clear boundary between elliptical and spiral galaxies. Instead they seem collectively to blend smoothly from one kind to another, with this galaxy as an example of an intermediate form.

Face on spiral
No two of these big blue spirals are ever quite the same, and this fairly pretty one is a good example of the complex changes in form from one part of the galaxy to another than can occur, from well defined arms to chaotic mush.

Face on Spiral
This pretty blue spiral galaxy has a bit more symmetry in its form than the previous one.

Face on Multi-limbed Spiral
This big pretty face-on blue spiral galaxy has three well defined limbs, and several others that are just fragments of full spiral arms, a very usual layout. It is also a bit rounder than the two prior examples, but it isn't clear whether this is just because it presents itself more flatly to the eye, or because some elliptical galaxies really are long ovals even when see in a direction perpendicular to their spin. We know from the solar system that long elliptical orbits are perfectly possible, so perhaps only careful measurement could resolve this question for an individual galaxy.

Eccentric Multi-Armed Spiral Overlapping Elliptical
Here is an example of nested spiralization patterns, where spiral arms within the elliptical main body of the galaxy trail out on one side into a diffuse arm containing several better defined arms or fragments. This is also one of the much coveted superposed galaxy arrangements, with an elliptical galaxy partly behind the spiral galaxy (at its bottom in the image). Scientists can use the fairly constantly colored and smoothly blended intensity light from the elliptical as a probe shining through the spiral's arms, to study where dust does and does not intercept the light or some spectral fraction of it, learning lots about the dust from this information. And what's with what looks like a chunk of a spiral arm making its escape toward the bottom right?

Almost Ring Spiral
Ring galaxies (this isn't one) are a type just beginning to be understood. Barred spiral galaxies have their spiral arms at the end of a long or short bar, rather than beginning near the center. This wide-barred pretty blue-white spiral galaxy has turned the spiral arms trailing from the ends of its bar nearly into a closed ring as well, but I don't think the two ring types are directly related.

Batter up!
This striking blue spiral looks like a baseball pitcher about to launch a yellow sphere (star or galaxy) at the onlooker. Pay attention also to the near right angle bend in the opposite spiral arm. What's with that?

Tall Skinny Blue Very Open Spiral Galaxy
This pretty blue galaxy with lots of bright clusters is a fairly commonly seen galaxy type, perhaps seen nearly edge on, perhaps not, but with a visual shape looking only barely different from a long elliptical galaxy, as if the urge to turn and become a spiral galaxy never really got very strong.

Immense Face On Blue Spiral Galaxy
This galaxy is visually huge, a fair fraction of the size of the full moon. It's probably visible to the naked eye. It is not only beautiful because of the nice detail, but also vastly reminiscent of a snail speeding across the heavens in a full charge, with its head to the right.

Galaxy With Offcenter Bulge
This galaxy is a mystery to me, the "central" bulge around which the galaxy spins seems instead to be almost all the way to one edge of the galaxy. With its smoothly dense white stars as a background, it almost looks like a ball with the arms wrapped around its surface instead of a disk with the arms embedded in it. What's with that?

Round Blue Clusters With Bunny Ears
This almost entirely blue galaxy is interesting for several reasons. It has a lot of nearly empty internal space. It forms a circle as round as a button. Its main bulge of stars, the only white part, is quite far off center. Most fun, though, is that on top and just a shade to the left, it seems to contain the headband with attached bunny ears made so famous by Playboy Club hostesses.

Face On MultiArmed Spiral With Large Blue Star
This very attractive and symmetrical face-on blue spiral galaxy is made more tutorial by the presence of a large blue star at its foot, lending a sense of how small even a galaxy this detailed as seen by a telescope really looms in space unmagnified.

Large White Spiral With Big Inner Disk And Short Arms
This vanilla pudding colored galaxy seems to have a closed curve of stars separating the inner and outer parts, with only a very subdued set of spiral arms jutting out from that curve.

Enormous Close Up Tight Wound Two Armed Blue Spiral
I have no idea why some spiral galaxies have one arm, some have two arms, some have many arms, and I can only blame "different rotation speeds" for why some of them barely spiral at all and others are tightly wound like yo-yo string. Whatever the causes, the result is a wide range of image types that are all spiral galaxies. This spiral galaxxy example is so big and close that it contains more detail than can be fit into my size of computer screen wallpaper, so this image was shrunk to fit rather than the more usual expanded to fit cases.

Diagonally Tilted Large Blue Spiral
This is one of the showy highly detailed blue spiral galaxies whose arms are completely contained in the larger halo of stars, giving the galaxy a smooth edge.

Galaxy Missed Because Of Nearby Bright Stars
The SDSS database doesn't even recognize this pretty, if nearly transparent, blues spiral galaxy to exist, probably because it is obscured by the much greater light of the two bright stars next to it in the sky.

Fat Armed Spiral Dust Study Candidate
The fairly low detail blue spiral galaxy with two interesting features. First, that it is superposed with a smaller elliptical galaxy, making it possibly useful for the Galaxy Zoo scientists to use in their proposed study of spiral galaxy dust lanes. Second, that the lower arm splits, one part going around the galaxy center as expected from symmetry with the opposite arm, the other trailing off as if some passing other galaxy had ripped part of the stars away into a long streamer. However, there is no second galaxy in the vicinity to be a suspect in such an interaction.

Mother and Daughter
Two spiral galaxies, the larger one a sparse, white, thick armed, fairly tightly spiraled one, the smaller one a blue unsymmetrical one, sit in very close visual proximity, like mother and daughter.

Galaxy Versus Star
This is an example of a fairly frequent occurrance, a pretty galaxy so close to a very bright star that it goes unnoticed, where if it were out in a less busy part of the sky, it would be noticed much earlier. This image has another interesting artifact besides the "cross" the telescope puts on bright stars and the halo around the star. There is the trail of an earth satellite right across the face of the galaxy, transparent dark blue because it crossed the image while the exposure was made, and so the objects behind it were only obscured part of the time.

Dart Board
This splendid face on spiral blue galaxy looks for all the world like it is being used as a dart board, with the smaller galaxy to its right and down being thrown at it as a dart.

Swirly With Pixel Flaw
This pretty face-on spiral galaxy has a broken pixel flaw right across it, but otherwise its well-swirled arms reminds this observer of the legs of a hermit crab seen in profile.

Nearly White Spiral
The well defined spiral arms of this face-on galaxy show only a hint of blue, making it a study in white-on-white.

Large Blue Oval-Barred Ill-Defined Spiral
This is another face-on blue spiral galaxy, with great detail but with its arms not well defined in long sweeping spirals, more in broken short sections instead. It sits in a fairly busy part of the sky, so the image is decorated by many small local stars.

Diagonal Long Two Limbed Spiral
This spiral may be a bit blurry, but it makes up for the lack of detail by a wealth of colors, white, yellow, red, and blue against a black backdrop.

Laid Back Spiral
This wonderful pool of swirling stars, probably seen at an angle, is free of imaging artifacts.

Dense Inner Arms Wispy Outer Arm Spiral
There's not much special about this pretty face on blue spiral galaxy, except that almost all the spiral arms are internal to the star halo, yet one stray spiral arm is well separated from that halo.

Blindingly Bright Blue Spiral
For some reason, the center of this blue spiral galaxy seems to be entirely overexposed, as if it were a searchlight pointed at the onlooker.

Red Pimple On Laid Back Spiral
This fairly low resolution spiral galaxy is seen on a slant, and the red star in front of it's top top looks like a complexion blemish. Notice also slightly down and left of the galaxy center, the appearance of an eruption up through the surface of the galaxy.

Triangular Irregular Galaxy
Irregular galaxies don't seem to make gravitational sense. This one, for example, is more or less trianglular, with a woven snake of bright clusters in one part of it.

Immense Edge On Spiral
The level of detail in the dust trails along the edge of this edge-on spiral galaxy is really unusual and splendid. The large red star just at the corner of the image lends scale.

Luminously Colored Edge On Spiral
This edge on spiral doesn't have the detail of the one above, but it has great color, from orange to blue, and reminds the onlooker of some marine organism darting after its prey.

Blue Spiral With Many Small Overlaps
This highly detailed blue spiral galaxy overlaps several yellow galaxies of much smaller visual size, making it look like a net full of fishes.

Simply Immense Unrecognized Spiral-Ring White Galaxy
Look carefully around the smooth cream egg of this galaxy, and you'll find that it is embedded in a less dense but very distinct ring. It is always fun finding something like this that has not yet been identified as a separate object of interest in the SDSS database.

Galaxy With Floating Arms
Around almost a smooth center, this galaxy knots a nearly circular ring, from which a wealth of arms extend only a short distance, and irregularly, If one looks carefully, the result looks like a stylized cartoon baby duck with beak to the bottom right and topknot to the top left.

Fraternal Twin Spiral Galaxies
Two very detailed spiral galaxies, different in color and in how closely they face the onlooker, lie visually close in space to make a single wallpaper.

Spiral Galaxy With Orbiting Cluster
Accented by a red star that oversaturates its part of the image, this blue spiral galaxy is mostly compact, except for one large orbiting blue cluster that may be arriving late to join the rest of the galaxy.

Huge Blue Spiral Next To Big Red Star
This gorgeously detailed face-on blue spiral galaxy fights for notice in its part of the sky with a large red star seen mostly just off screen.

Food Processor Blade Plus Small Loose Companion
The larger blue spiral galaxy in this image looks like it was put together out of angular parts. Its smaller companion looks like it has been run once through the blender, little substance seems to remain to it.

Blue Potato Sprouting
Unlike the airy look of most galaxies, this blue spiral seems to be very solid, like a blue spud hunkered down in space, sprouting arms from its dense substance.

Local Star Cluster
This isn't a galaxy at all, it is the much smaller cousin to a galaxy, a star cluster right here in the Milky Way, a knot of stellar density with its own family of stars orbiting its own center while the whole mass orbits the center of the Milky Way.

Spiral With Southerly Star Wash
This whirling cream pool has a wash of loose stars that form a wispy arm to the top right, but only a blurred wash of stars to the bottom right, without much visible structure.

Blue Ice Stirred Not Shaken
It seems like some malefactor was trying to irritate James Bond, serving this blue ice martini galaxy stirred not shaken.

White Spiral Near Two Bright Stars
This very painterly white spiral galaxy has two bright nearby stars superposed with it to lend it color.

Tadpole Chase
The physics in this low detail possible galaxy merger are surely otherwise, but it looks like one galaxy is chasing the other across the heavens.

Blue Spiral Superposed Pink Star
This very bright blue spiral galaxy has a star of unusual color superposed over it, a sort of a spearmint pink.

Sparse MultiArmed Blue Spiral
This just has to be one of the prettiest galaxies in the heavens as seen from Earth. There is something very spiderlike in its open nest of arms.

Spiral Widely Dispersed Clusters
This low resolution blue spiral has a lot of exterior clustering that is too sparse to form arms but spreads out interestingly into space.

Edge On Spiral Near Yellow Star
It is only when seen edge on that the central bulge of spiral galaxies becomes evident. There is lots more to such a galaxy than a spinning flat disk. In this image, a color coordinated yellow star floats as companion to this otherwise isolated seeming galaxy.

Moderately Well Defined White Ring Galaxy
Before the Galaxy Zoo project began, ring galaxies like this were known, not understood, and considered to be very rare. Lots more of them have now been found, so maybe someday understanding can arise from the now much larger set of samples available for study.

Pretty Open Two Armed White Spiral
Some galaxies have thin well defined arms with lots of empty space, or of other non-arm galaxy material, between them. Others, like this one, have thick arms with only thin lanes separating them.

Sparse Blue Spiral
Here in low resolution is the opposite situation to the above one, a blue spiral galaxy with thin arms, and with lots of empty space between them.

Low Contrast Distant White Spiral
This low resolution white spiral seems to be made "all of one substance" with little color differentiation across the whole galaxy image.

Low Contrast Blue Spiral With Ugly Bad Pixel Stripe
This blue spiral galaxy has low color contrast, and an interesting right angle corner in one of its spral arms, but it is marred by an extremely broad dead pixel flaw drawn across it by the viewing device's sensor.

Merger Aftermath In Blue
The eye wants to scale this image intimately, like it was a couple of glowing blue nematode worms negotiating the best sparring position for a mating duel on the back of a domino, but the scale for galaxy collisions like this one is almost a quintillionfold that big.

Edge On Yellow Spiral
The galaxy classifier gets to see lots of edge on spiral galaxies. Only rarely is the detail sufficient to distinguish the dust lanes splitting the edge into top and bottom halves, as in this case.

Fiddler Crab Blue Spiral Galaxy
The closer spiral arm of this blue spiral galaxy is unusually crisp and intense, giving it the look of the dominant arm of some space borne species of fiddler crab, raised in warning to avoid or commence battle.

The Holy Grail As Two Merging Galaxies
These low resolution but unusually symmetric colliding galaxies can be seen many ways, but one fun one is as a drinking cup, the long sought Holy Grail drawn across the heavens. There is even a star to stand in as a jewel on the rim of the cup.

Unusual Green Edged Elliptical Galaxy
Green is a color that catches the human eye, making it all the more unusual how rarely it is seen when classifying galaxies. Here though, the eye leaves no doubt that the color intended for the outer halo of stars in this low resolution elliptical galaxy is green.

White Ring Galaxy Superposed On Blue Spiral Galaxy
Superposed galaxies of roughly identical sizes are rarely seen in this detail. These cases look fingerpainted, one of them from an intensely blue palatte, and the other is a rare ring galaxy.

Four Galaxy Styles Lined Up
A sparse lenticular blue galaxy, a blue spiral galaxy of loose organization, a white barred spiral, and either an orange star or an orange dwarf galaxy, line up like a dance hall number being rehearsed.

Open White Three Limbed Spiral
Like many mutants, this galaxy seems to have grown an extra limb from somewhere, and the result has left its shape awkward and confused.

Medium White Spiral With Several Neighboring Objects
White spiral galaxies aren't too pretty in themselves unless they are seen in very high detail, but this galaxy's visual companions lend the image a bit of needed color.

Mystic Eye Of Power On A Rocker
This symbol in space seems very similar to eyes depictied in Egyptian heiroglyphics and tomb drawings. One end seems to spiral back to create a rocker on which the rest of the image can rest.

Possible Irregular Galaxy Source -- Slug And Ball Merger
This is probably the most detailed galaxy image I've found myself, a merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spherical galaxy that seem to be tearing out of the substance of the two galaxies a product of blue clusters that will be left behind when the two colliding galaxies have long fled the scene. This looks like one possible origin for the mysterious irregular galaxies: as debris from such mergers.

Large White Elliptical With Great Internal Detail
I'd like this to be a cream on cream spiral galaxy, but there's no indication of chirality, just lots of internal dust lane detail.

Narrow Blue Spiral Galaxy
I'm fairly sure this lovely detailed blue spiral is narrow because of the direction from which we view it, not from its actual shape.

Distant Blue Spiral With Small Purple Discoloration
The detail isn't too great in this face on blue spiral galaxy, but the symmetry is pretty and the details are fun, a yellow elliptical galaxy seen through a thin spot in the much larger spiral's structure, and a minor purpling of the stars at about the 5 o'clock position right at the edge of the spiral galaxy.

Sloppy Face On Spiral
This very loose and open blue spiral galaxy seems to have been tossed together as an afterthought from a kit of leftover star clusters, as if it didn't quite know where it was going. Unlike for many more opaque face-on spirals, the background galaxies show through this one as if through tattered lace.

Yellow White Edge On Spiral With Good Color
This relatively nearby edge on spiral has great detail in the roiling dust clouds that cross its center.

Large Neighbors Edge On Spiral And Face On Spiral
These neighboring spiral galaxies, one face on, one edge on, are shown separately in greater detail in the above two links, but make a pretty wallpaper arrangement when shown in their natural orientation to each other as well.

Let's Just Back Out One More Level ... LOOK AT THAT!!!
An immense beautiful face-on complexly-armed blue spiral galaxy. I really did say aloud to myself just before finding this "Let's just back out one more level...<censored>!"

Limpid Pool
Some spiral galaxies have raggedy bits sticking out every direction, but this pretty blue one is smoothly embedded in its halo of stars, like a limpid pool.

Smooth Edged Blue Spiral
This blue spiral has its arms entirely contained within the smooth oval of the galaxy boundary.

Pretty but Lopsided Ring Galaxy
These galaxies, thought to be very rare before the Gakaxy Zoo project, are now identified in greater numbers but still their origin is only partially understood, with a face to face collision between two spiral galaxies apparently the current best idea.

Dust Study Candidate Pair
This blue spiral galaxy overlapping a white elliptical galaxy is of scientific interest, because the light from the elliptical galaxy can be used as a kind of probe to study the dust clouds in the spiral galaxy through which it shines.

Utterly Spectacular Edge On Spiral Galaxy
Does the dust band across this galaxy really take a break conveniently at the center, or is the center just so bright it saturated the image collecter in the middle right through the dust? This galaxy spans around 7.5 arc minutes tip to tip, making it visually huge. Notice how busy the sky is here, with lots of other more distant stuff visible right through this comparatively nearby galaxy's halo of stars.

Distant Letter S Spiral Galaxy
As a vanity signature for the project web forum, lots of Galaxy Zoo participants like to compose a collage image from low detail galaxy images they've found while classifying, that spells out their name or Internet nickname. The letter "S" is one of the easiest ones to find.

Super Clean Edge-on White Spiral Galaxy
This is obviously, from its shape, a spiral galaxy seen edge-on. What is unusual is that there is no sign of a dust band along where the spiral's edge should be. In comparison, our Milky Way looks like it was rolled on its edge down a fresh tarred road, when looked at from the only direction we have available.

Blue Face-on Spiral with Small Red Stars
There's nothing remarkable about this good sized, pretty, face-on blue spiral galaxy, but it does have a sprinkle of red stars near the top.

Very Obliquely Viewed Large Blue Spiral Galaxy
This is what a large, comparatively nearby blue spiral galaxy (about 4 arc minutes in length) looks like seen from an angle that makes it nearly but not quite edge-on to the viewer. Notice the two other easily seen galaxies in this image. That's a crowded sky out there.

Blue Face-on Spiral Galaxy with Blindingly White Bar
This large pretty face-on blue spiral galaxy is most noteworthy for the intense white glare cast off by its elongated core area. In shape, the galaxy evokes the image of a dancer going into a twirl to flare her skirts, arms above her head.

Blue Streak
This bright blue galaxy full of hot young stars doesn't give many hints as to its type. Elliptical? Edge on spiral? Irregular? It's hard to tell when there's so little to see except a blue streak of stars painted across the field of view.

Shades of Blue
Two modest blue spiral galaxies very close in size and shape are neighbors, differing mostly in that one is almost all blue like a roiled light blue pudding, while the other is mostly a field of white stars with blue clusters only in the arms wrapped around the center part.

Big Well Spread Blue Spiral Galaxy
This large, fairly isolated blue spiral galaxy is noteworthy mostly for the sweeping "gestures" of its two main spiral arms, and the even spacing of all the secondary arms.

Three Superposed Non-Trivial Galaxies
At a scale of half an arc second per pixel, this large mostly creamy white spiral galaxy is simple visually immense, around 8 arc minutes in its long diameter, which makes the edge on orangish spiral galaxy at 10 o'clock and the white elliptical at 5 o'clock both overlapping it, both big objects in themselves.

Crisp White Spiral Galaxy
This only slightly less visually immense galaxy was encountered in the same pulled back view of the data set as the above image. It doesn't have the overlapping galaxies, but makes up for that by having more pronounced spiral arms, that clearly extend out past a well defined elliptical main body of stars.

Star's Partner
This highly detailed blue spiral galaxy competes for the viewer's attention with a bright star whose imaging artifacts obscure a small part of the more defined of the galaxy's two wide flung spiral arms.

Nicely Symmetrical Blue Spiral Galaxy
This nicely symmetrical blue spiral galaxy has its spirals more defined by darkness than by light, because it is light almost everywhere.

Ratty White-on-Blue Spiral Galaxy with Edge-on Smaller Companion
I almost oriented this wallpaper the wrong way, but good luck had me seeing the companion galaxy 1/4th the diameter of the larger galaxy before I commited to that choice. The main item of interest in the big galaxy besides its disheveled appearance is that the two main spiral arms appear as white against blue, where the opposite color contrast is the usual case.

Creamy Ambiguous Chirality Large Spiral Galaxy
One would think it would be easy to tell which way a big, nearly face on galaxy with so much internal detail, like this one, is turning, but the contrast between the dust lanes and the stars is so low, the eye changes its guess constantly.

Chalk on a Rock
This white thick-armed fairly open spiral galaxy looks as much like an Australian natives' pteroglyph depiction of The Dreamtime, as it does an image from the heavens. Look carefully, and you'll see that the spiral starts at the inside as a single arm, but splits in two after one turn and continues as two spirals solidly to the exterior.

Complex Blue Galaxy with No Obvious Spiral Arms
This long oval blue galaxy has many blue clusters of stars, but no obvious structure that would lead one to give it a "spiral" classification

Large Open Armed Blue Spiral Galaxy with Peep-through Distant Galaxies
This large blue spiral has arms separate enough from the main body of the galaxy that some much more distant galaxies show nestled in those arms.

Spectacular Galaxy Collision that Nearly Destroyed the Smaller Galaxy Involved
A spectacular "train wreck" seems to have destroyed and stretched to great length a small galaxy, while the larger galaxy involved seems to be fairly intact, but with its arms ripped mostly away. An uninvolved elliptical galaxy, sitting in front of the wreckage toward the bottom, obsucres but decorates part of the mechanics of the collision.

Local Globular Cluster Near Large Red Star
This large globular cluster, somewhere within the Milky Way, dominates the surrounding area of the stars even at the farthest pullback of the SDSS data set. A large red star, visually bigger than all but the most nearby galaxies, but much smaller than this cluster, gives some sense of scale of just how huge a globular cluster looms in the heavens.

Triplets
Here's another pretty triple of galaxies, one edge on spiral, one distinct elliptical, one very pretty face on spiral, near to each other visually in the sky, making a pretty wallpaper.

Blue Spiral with Many Well Groomed Arms
The leftmost of the triple of galaxies above makes a pretty wallpaper by itself, too, and looks like it just came back from a trip to the hairdressers.

Merger Like an Arm Dropped Off
This obvious galaxy merger left a trail of stars between the two involved galaxies, but because one is perhaps edge on, and they are the same creamy color laced with the red of dust lanes, it looks like one is an arm that "dropped off" the other. Despite being low resolution, the result makes a very striking wallpaper, since the local area of space is otherwise very dark.

Blurry Spiral Galaxy Barely Beginning To Spin
Elliptical galaxy types supposedly blend smoothly into spiral galaxy types. This image, of a distant galaxy and therefore of low resolution, shows an elliptical-shaped envelope within which a spiral center has just barely but distinctly begun to turn, an example of an intermediate type of galaxy.

Large Globular Cluster with Many Red Stars
This visually huge globular cluster (about 20 arc minutes across) has many large red stars in the foreground that seem to be part of it.

Spiral Galaxy Like Rolled Cookie Dough
This pretty spiral galaxy is very neatly rolled up, much like the two-colored cookie dough my grandmother used to make. A smaller elliptical galaxy stands guard nearby.

Messy Blue Spiral Galaxy with Tiny Center
This low visual density blue spiral galaxy seems to be fraying apart in every direction. The tiny size of its central white area is noteworthy as well.

Two White Spirals Merging
In the distance, and thus at low resolution, two adjacent white spiral galaxiess exchange stars, producing a misshapen halo of stars that surrounds them both.

Blue Spiral Galaxy Smooth as an Egg
This pretty, screen filling blue spiral galaxy has its spiral arms entirely contained in its star halo, producing a smooth symmetrical edge.

Irregular Blue Galaxy Somewhat Resembling a Waving Elf
There's little rhyme nor reason to the shape of this galaxy, with arms sticking out every which way, but if you make the lower left the feet and the upper right the head, you can almost make out an elf with one arm waving or about to throw something, a trailing stocking cap from the head, and one arm by its side. The face isn't much to brag on though, just the usual white core of the galaxy.

Galaxy Much Too Big to Hide Behind a Star
This lovely highly detailed blue spiral galaxy is a study in contrasts, a very compact center with a well defined boundary and the spiral arms contained inside it, plus numerous islands of star development floating free around that main image. It is so close/large that the big red star superposed on it is more a decoration than a hiding place. Many, many other smaller galaxies are still well defined in the image, yet the main impression of the region surrounding the main galaxy image is still inky blackness. There is also a highly unusual detail of the spiral arms, that rather than starting from opposite ends of a bar or from points spaced around the edge of a central whirl, they all are rooted from a single point distant from the center, which then forms rather a turn around point for the arms than a terminus for any one arm, as if a folded layer of stellar dough were rolled startnig from the fold point to make a spiral. Note also for a laugh the small pair of nose-glasses floating exactly at the top of the galaxy.

Large Open Armed Medium Detail White Spiral Galaxy
This isn't the most detailed galaxy, but it jumped right off the original Galaxy Zoo classification image as a beauty. But what is that grey cloud south of center and before the arms begin?

Wild Day in the Local Universe
This sprawling blue spiral galaxy looks to be running out of control in a busy part of the sky.

Galaxy Suffering from Anorexia
Colorful, but proportioned like a pencil, this galaxy seems to need to digest a few smaller galaxies to gain some weight.

Big Elliptical Galaxy with Quasi-spiral Internal Structures
This big pretty blue galaxy has everything a spiral galaxy could want, except spirals!

Motor Boat Merger
This is either a remnant of a long past near collision that ripped two parts of an existing, perhaps originally elliptical, galaxy into skewed alignments with the main body, or else this is a merger well underway, but with one fragment spalled off to be for now a mini-galaxy orbiting the rest of the two merging galaxies. In any case, the dense and brilliant blue of short lived new stars where the two offset galaxy fragments join shows that a violent shockwave has been experienced in that vicinity quite "recently".

Cat's Eye Barred Loose Blue Spiral Galaxy
This pretty, loose limbed blue spiral galaxy shows a prominent bar with some visible dust lanes along the bar, has inner spiral arms forming a distinctive "cat's eye" shape, and is superposed by several bright stars.

Owl With a Halo
This trio of a smaller elliptical galaxy, and a barely superposed large spiral galaxy and large elliptical galaxy, make a pretty wallpaper. When seen on my laptop screen from the bedroom door at an angle, which changes the color and intensity of the image, it looks like an owl "mask" with red eyes, dressed up with a halo.

Aslant View of a Horizontal Blue Spiral Galaxy
This nice blue spiral galaxy, seen from an angle, has a much smaller yellow spiral galaxy floating above it looking sort of like a left apostrophe.

Benthic Denizen
This blue, possibly spiral galaxy has obviously seen better times. A part of it has been pulled like silly putty into a grotesquely large spiral arm looking much like a tadpole "tail", it has a bright, nearly white star for an eye, an underslung jaw, nostrils, a gill slit, and in general looks very like a ratfish floating head downward ready to pounce on some passing shrimp.

Milky Merger
Whoops! Two pretty yellow-white spiral galaxies are in the process of ripping one another into something that will probably be much less attractive when the merger is completed.

Zebco
With two bright blue loose spiral arms, one exceptionally elongated, this galaxy's shape looks less like a product purely of spin than of one arm being flycast into the universe while the other is used as a handle to do that casting.