It’s the best kind of space picture: a collection of bizarre galaxies with freakish shapes. Who cares about those boring spiral arm galaxies when you can have the smooshed ass galaxy, or two galaxies crashing into each other? These misshapen beauties were captured by a research consortium called AEGIS, which just released a bunch of images taken by ultra-high-powered telescope arrays that show us heretofore-unseen vistas of deep space. Of course, the farther you peer into the depths of the universe, the further you travel back in time, so these images are all from the early years of our universe.
Google Earth freaks can look at them all pretty-like using the new Google Sky feature, but for those who don’t want to download a bunch of crap there’s the gallery at AEGIS. Another bonus of this whole image gallery is discovering the name of one of the main research groups devoted to deep-space pix: the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe, or DEEP2 team. Sounds like something from a 1970s scifi flick, or a new vibrator from Babes in Toyland.
