Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Draco (Dra)
ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy, Jason Guenzel
ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy
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ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy

ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy, Jason Guenzel
ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy
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ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy

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Ahh, The Tadpole... what's to say?

This is another image that was inspired by the amazing Hubble image of the area. The main galaxy is somewhere just over 400 million light years distant. What was once likely a compact spiral was unraveled by an interloper that is now actually behind the main galaxy. In the Hubble shot that galaxy is barely discernable, so in mine it is just a diffuse blob seen just above the core and next to the main bar. The resulting structural damage left an enormously long, 280,000 light year, tidal tail. The feature is filled with young and brilliant blue young stars. When viewing the resulting mess, it's quite obvious to see where the nickname comes from.

The main galaxy is less than one arcminute in width! It shines at a magnitude of 14.4, but the extended structures are many times fainter. There are a couple other larger galaxies seen in the widefield crop and a clumpy field of hundreds of background galaxies.

In my image North is to the left. I fought some poor imaging conditions with this image. I ended up discarding a good percentage of the data I collected (over 25%) due to poor seeing. I would like to add more but this area of the sky just seems to be jinxed for me. Anyway, I did have one night of excellent seeing that contributed to about half the luminance frames. Overall, it seems to have worked out.

Enjoy!

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ARP188 - The Tadpole Galaxy, Jason Guenzel