Is the bright red body a star? I was helping classify galaxies at Galaxy Zoo when I came across this picture of a galaxy. The dull red body looks huge compared to the galaxy. Is it because it is closer to the earth? It would be interesting to know what is going on here.
It is a bright star. You can see the "diffraction spikes" that are the signature of a point-like object.

The star will be in our Galaxy, so is certainly closer than the galaxy in the image. However, this is not why it appears to be big.

The image appears big because the starlight will be spread by the telescope objects over a finite area - the point spread function. In addition, when a star is very bright, the central CCD pixels saturate and charge can spill into adjacent pixels. Even if that were not the case, there is enough light in the "wings" of the point spread function to produce a large image.