Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Draco (Dra)  ·  Contains:  NGC 6491  ·  NGC 6493
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NGC 6491, Gary Imm
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NGC 6491

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NGC 6491, Gary Imm
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NGC 6491

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Description

This Astrobin Debut Object is a trio of galaxies, each fascinating in structure, located in the constellation of Draco at a declination of +62 degrees. 

The brightest galaxy near image center is NGC 6491.  This galaxy lies 260 million light years away.  It spans 1.5 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a Milky Way like diameter of 120,000 light years.  A bright core is surrounded by a pseudoring in the outer disk.  I like the blue semicircle of star clusters on the right side, which is mirrored on the left with a much shorter length section.  The galaxy is highlighted by an arc of 4 colorful stars, ranging from deep orange to blue in color, just to the right.

To the lower left is NGC 6493, a bit further away at 275 million light years  This faint blue galaxy has multiple arms and several Vorontsov-Velyaminov rows.  Each of these 2 NGC galaxies appears to be disturbed.  The data suggests that they are too far apart to be disturbing each other, but it is possible that the data is off by a few percent and that they are interacting.

UGC 11007 is the winner in the odd galaxy competition.  Unfortunately, we know nothing about this beautiful blue galaxy.  Is it an absurdly deformed edge-on spiral, or is it a face-on spiral with one arm and no disk?  A possible white companion is seen to its lower left, but it is hard to image that a small companion could create such a disturbance.

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