It's a beautiful day in this galactic neighbourhood captured by NASA's Hubble space telescope, but not everything is as close as it seems. Although the four large spiral galaxies in this snapshot appear close together, they are actually quite far apart. This image is a great example of the difficulty of determining the separation between galaxies from a 2D perspective.

The largest galaxy on the right, NGC 1356, appears to be directly adjacent to the smaller galaxy LEDA 95415, which overlaps one of its arms. In reality, they are about 300 million light years apart. Meanwhile, the galaxy on the left, IC 1947, is only about 400,000 kilometres away from NGC 1356, although it appears more distant in 2-D.

Image description:

A collection of four galaxies stands out in black space filled with stars and other small galaxies. In the right half of the image, a large spiral galaxy is joined by two smaller spirals - one directly above and one overlapping one of its arms on the left. A fourth spiral galaxy stands alone on the left side of the image.

It's like a collection in the sky, isn't it?