The next acquisition brought back from Namibia is the galaxy PGC 2248, known as the "Carthweel Galaxy." This object was captured with the joint efforts of my friend Mateusz Kalisz, the creator of the Astrolife YouTube channel, whom I highly recommend.

In my opinion, this is truly a fantastic galaxy. It sparked my admiration from the moment I saw the first image captured by the Hubble telescope (1995), and after the publication of a photo taken with the JWST (2022), capturing it independently became one of my goals for the expedition to Namibia. Mateusz had similar feelings and sentiments for the Carthweel galaxy, which is why we were so excited when we unanimously chose the last night of our stay in Hakos for the "hunting" session.

A few more words about the galaxy itself and its smaller neighbors.

The Carthweel galaxy, located approximately 500 million light-years away from us, with a brightness of 19.3 mag, is visible in the Sculptor constellation. It is rarely photographed by amateur astronomers. Its Carthwheel-like appearance is the result of a violent event - a collision with a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy, which is not visible in the images. Collisions of galaxies on this scale trigger a cascade of various smaller events among the involved victims, and the Carthweel Galaxy is no exception. The collision had the greatest impact on the shape and structure of this galaxy. The Carthweel Galaxy has two rings - a bright inner ring and an outer colorful ring that surrounds it. These two rings spread outward from the point of collision, similar to ripples on a pond after throwing a stone. Due to these distinctive features, astronomers call it a "ring galaxy," similar to objects like Hoag's Object. This structure is much less common than, for example, spiral galaxies. Its bright core contains a vast amount of hot dust, and the brightest areas are home to giant young star clusters. On the other hand, the outer ring, which has been expanding for about 440 million years, is dominated by star formation and supernovae. As it expands, this ring encounters surrounding gas and triggers star formation.

We captured the image using a SW Synta 16" telescope with a Player One Uranus-C planetary camera (IMX 585). The 1341 frames x 1.5 seconds each add up to a total exposure time of 33.5 minutes ;)

Considering its size - 1.1' × 0.9', I think the results we obtained weren't too bad ;)"