This
Astrobin Debut Object is a pair of spiral galaxies located 200 million light years away in the constellation of Eridanus at a declination of -1 degrees.
NGC 1568 is the brighter face-on galaxy at left. The structure is interesting – the outer half is diffuse and featureless, while the inner half has a bright yellow core, a bar, and a surrounding oval brighter region. The galaxy spans 1.3 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 100,000 light years. It does not appear disturbed to me.
UGC 3031 is the smaller galaxy at right. It has a diameter of 30,000 light years. It appears that the gravitational interaction with its larger companion has created a large star stream which connects the 2 galaxies and extends far to the other side of UGC 3031 as well. This curving star stream is about 200,000 light years long and looks similar to that of
Arp 252. I define any star stream longer than 150,000 light years as "superlong" and have assembled a collection of such star streams
here.
The pretty spiral galaxy at lower right, UGC 3029, is also a similar distance away.
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