This
Astrobin Debut Object, in the lower right of the image, is a pair of interacting spiral galaxies located 250 million light years away in the constellation of Cancer at a declination of +21 degrees. This object was classified by Dr. Arp into the category of Galaxies with Appearance of Fission.
Both of these magnitude 15.4 galaxies have strong 2-armed disk structures resembling a deformed grand design spiral shape. The upper left galaxy, IC 2339, is the slightly larger galaxy at 80,000 light years in diameter. A faint star stream bridge connects the 2 galaxies on the right side.
My favorite part of this object is the extended star stream to the upper left. This extension was not captured in the Arp image. As we have seen before in interacting pairs, the star stream has a dense area towards its furthest upper left extension. When these dense areas are a bit brighter, Dr. Arp sometimes describes them as a 3rd galaxy, which they do not appear to be. He doesn’t refer to a 3rd galaxy in this case.
Several other interesting background galaxies are seen. The large lenticular galaxy is IC 2341 and the edge-on spiral is 2MASX J08235222+2125079. Interestingly, these 2 galaxies are about the same distance away as the Arp object. The top 2 galaxies do not show disturbance, so I do not believe all 4 are interacting.
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