This irregular dwarf galaxy is located only 1.7 million light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius at a declination of -15 degrees. It is a magnitude 8.1 galaxy which spans 14 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 7,000 light years. This galaxy is brighter, larger, and closer than any other dwarf irregular galaxy in our nearby Local Group.
NGC 6822 is nicknamed Barnard's Galaxy, discovered by the great astronomer Dr. Edward Emerson Barnard in 1884. Like all other objects at that time, he thought that this nebulous glow was part of our Milky Way galaxy. Later, after Dr. Barnard passed away in 1923, Dr. Edwin Hubble discovered that this is actually a self-contained independent galaxy. Curious to me that an object named Barnard's Galaxy was never recognized as a galaxy by Dr. Barnard.
This object contains a mere 10 million stars - a very small number compared to our Milky Way Galaxy's estimated 400 billion stars. Interestingly, dwarf galaxies outnumber large ones in our universe. They get their random, blob-like forms from close encounters with other galaxies, when gravity's attraction can dramatically warp and scramble their shape.
This is one of the few galaxies outside of ours where we are able to image globular clusters. I have indicated 8 of them on the mouseover - most appear as simple dim smudges in the image, and a couple are very difficult to see.
My favorite part of this object are the colorful blue star clouds and red Ha regions towards the top of the galaxy, faint and small but clearly visible.
Faint IFN is seen streaking throughout the image from upper right to lower left, seen better in this starless version of the image:
The lovely blue PN towards the top of the image is NGC 6818. A longer focal length image is seen here:
NGC 6818 
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