[tcar]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Correct. There are 3 galaxies in that picture, the obvious giant one, the large fuzzy ball at 3 o'clock from that, and there is the edge of one right on the top edge of the picture. Everything else is a star nearby to us, in our own galaxy.
The individual stars are anywhere from, say, 10-5000 lightyears away, while the Galaxies are 2.5 million light years away.

The 2 smaller galaxies are called satellite galaxies, they actually orbit around the main one (over some hundreds of millions of years each orbit, they've only gone around maybe 20 times since they formed).

Fantastic... thank you.