NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy (Michael Feigenbaum)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Aries (Ari) · Contains: NGC 770 · NGC 772 · PGC 1573401 · PGC 1575486 · PGC 1575861 · PGC 1577099 · PGC 1577343 · PGC 1577957 · PGC 212884 · PGC 7493 · PGC 7509

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NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

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NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

After a bit of a respite from DS imaging, because of the annual Arizona monsoon, a foray into the realm of planetary imaging, and some rather intense work projects, we have this image of NGC 772.

This is an huge galaxy, about 2x the size of our Milky Way and located a whopping 130 million light years away in Aries. I find it a very interesting subject with the apparent interaction with the dwarf elliptical NGC770 that has resulted in the distortion of one of the spiral arms. Dr. Arp has this in his Atlas and has classified it as a "Spiral galaxy with a small high-surface brightness companion". (Thank you Gary Imm for introducing me to the Arp catalogue!)

There is also a multitude of small and obviously quite distant galaxies in the field, many of which the Pixinsight plate solving does not pick up.

This was a challenging image to make as it is quite small at 7.2' x 4.3' according to Telescopius. Still, this subject is ~50x further away from us than M31 which does bring some perspective to the sheer enormity of this galaxy.

Additionally, while our weather is transitioning from the monsoon to the fall/winter weather patterns, it seems as though the seeing has been uncharacteristically poor.

I have included a monochrome version as a revision. In many ways I prefer this one, primarily because of the better contrast of monochrome images generally.

Anyway, I hope you like this one and as always, comments and/or criticism welcome!

CS, good health...

Original
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Description: Luminance channel 14h08m

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Description: Complete reprocess -

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7107877
PixInsight job	5TNTCDQ1Y1HU5N4DIXS94T9IZGSF2MSV
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	01h59m20s.132
RA (top/left)	01h59m45s.391
RA (top/right)	01h59m51s.862
RA (bottom/right)	01h58m54s.843
RA (bottom/left)	01h58m48s.491

Dec (center)	+19°00′17″.39
Dec (top/left)	+18°50′39″.20
Dec (top/right)	+19°08′47″.100
Dec (bottom/right)	+19°09′55″.62
Dec (bottom/left)	+18°51′46″.45

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NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

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NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

NGC 772 (Arp 78) aka The Fiddlehead Galaxy

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