Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Serpens (Ser)
Hoag's Galaxy, Colin McGill
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Hoag's Galaxy

Hoag's Galaxy, Colin McGill
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Hoag's Galaxy

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Description

Egged on by Lorenzo, I took some images of this (actually, lots, about 30 hours worth but had to throw half away because of poor seeing).

An interesting object, but hard to image - I pushed the smoothing mask harder than normal to avoid smoothing out the little detail there is in the galaxy. If you zoom in, you can just make out that part of the ring is thicker than the other (top right), and there is a little internal structure.

When it was first discovered (1950), Hoag proposed that the ring around the galaxy was caused by gravitational lensing. If you have a multi-billion space telescope available to you, you can see that the internal structure is actually spiral arms forming a ring around the galaxy. There is also a much larger hydrogen structure surrounding the rings, but you can't see that here!

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Hoag's Galaxy, Colin McGill