here's my final project for astronomy 137, or the first part of it anyhow. this is the face-on spiral ngc 1232, ain't it purty? the blur in the top right is its companion galaxy 1232a, which they're actually not sure if it's a physical companion or only a visual companion...there's disagreement in the redshift data. pretty neat.
and here's part two, an image of ngc 1097. this one is in color, yay, though not precisely real color since we didn't take a blue image, but, eh, you do what you can. this galaxy is also cool because it has the longest optical jets of any observed galaxy...which you can't see in this image, but we'll pretend. neat bit of trivia: the first observation of those jets was made at the same place i took this, cerro tololo. *grins*