The public has spoken. Over 140,000 votes were cast for the next celestial object that the Hubble Space Telescope should observe, and nearly half of them went to the interacting galaxy system known as Arp 274 (also known as NGC 5679). The result is a stunningly beautiful picture of not just two, but three, galaxies roughly 400 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The image is dominated by two face-on spiral galaxies with a third compact galaxy in the bottom left. The two bright spots above the right most galaxy are actually foreground stars in the Milky Way. The colors in the image represent the distribution of hydrogen gas, which is the dominant element of stars and of the Universe as a whole. Younger, hotter stars in the spiral arms appear blue, while new star forming nebulae are pink. Older, cooler, yellower stars are located in the center bulges of each galaxy. You can also clearly see the dust lanes lining the spiral arms where new stars are likely to form in the future.
While I personally voted for the edge-on galaxy, I always love a good interacting galaxy system. Even though you can still clearly see the strong spiral structures in the two larger galaxies, it's a safe bet that it won't last for long (at least on galactic time scales - a.k.a. millions of years). Gravity is already hard at work choreographing their cosmic tango.
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