Moving Closer To The Grand Spiral

An international team of astronomers from Chile, Europe and North America [1] is announcing the most accurate distance yet measured to a galaxy beyond our Milky Way's close neighbours. The distance was determined using the brightness variation of a type of stars known as "Cepheid variables".

The team used the ISAAC near-infrared camera and spectrometer on ESO's 8.2-m VLT Antu telescope to obtain deep images in the near-infrared of three fields in the spiral galaxy NGC 300. Together these fields contain 16 long-period Cepheids. These stars had previously been discovered by the team in a wide-field imaging survey of this galaxy conducted with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) camera on the ESO/MPG 2.2-m telescope at La Silla.

Read more at Science Daily...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050814173016.htm