Arp 273 or “A Rose Made of Galaxies”—I just think of them as “the Rose Galaxies”—are at least two interacting galaxies some 300 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda. UGC 1810, the “upper” galaxy, contains about five times more mass than its neighbor, UGC 1813, the “lower” galaxy. UGC 1813 is thought to have passed through, if not simply near, its neighbor, and through this interaction the two have tidally distorted into a rose-like shape. It appears at least a third galaxy (the warm “star”-sized blip in vaguely discernible swirling at the “top” of UGC 1810 in this perspective) may also be involved.

Along the top of UGC 1810 are splinters of blue jewel-like structures comprised of young blue stars. UGC 1813 shows signs of intense star formation, possibly triggered by this interaction. The bright stars littered across this image are inside our own galaxy, and plenty more galaxies are littered about. Arp 273 was first described in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, produced by Halton Arp (hence Arp 273) and released in 1966.

These galaxies are stupid far away (technical term for some 300 million light years) and rather “small” from our perspective, making them a very challenging target to image through the pursuit of amateur tomfoolery, but I have wanted to image these of these for some time. They are just so daggone beautiful. I got my chance on October 8, 2023, thanks to a gorgeous clear night in the desert with a strikingly stable atmosphere, no wind, no moon until later into the night, and these jewels passing overhead. I’ll take it as the universe tossing me a bone ahead of what may well be another long, cold, stormy winter.

Details: Celestron EdgeHD 8 with 0.7x reducer, ZWO ASI 2600MM Pro, Bin1, Astronomik Deep-Sky RGB and UV/IR filters, all riding on a Rainbow Astro RST-135E. 25x180s each of RGB and 98x120s Luminance for about 7 hours of data. Calibrated with darks (optimized), flats, and bias. Edited in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop.

Editing: Stacked in PixInsight with normalization and no drizzle. Cropped; background extraction (ABE); color calibration (SPCC); deconvolution (Deconvolution and BlurX blend); stars removed; noise reduction (NoiseX, masked); color refinement (curves and GHS), stretched (GHS); luminance image refined in Photoshop and more noise reduction, LRGB combination; additional refinement and adjustment (colors, detail, noise). Smaller galaxies were gathered, protected, and edited with a mask to avoid overlap with stars image (worked like a charm). Stars image got more color adjustment, masked noise reduction, stretched (GHS), extracted, and blended into LRGB image (PixelMath). Stars reduced (hat tip to Bill Blanshan) and refined. Photoshop used for final details, nudging out more detail, final larger adjustments for presentation (e.g. deeper contrast, final crops from larger field of view).