This object is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation of Aries at a declination of +15 degrees. It shares this tight field of view with many other interesting galaxies, none of which are considered to be interacting closely with it. This is one of those “in-between” images. The main object (NGC 877) is not quite spectacular itself to garner a lot of attention, and the rest of the galaxies are not actually a cluster. But, this chance collection of galaxies still provides an interesting field in my opinion. I love that each of the 6 main galaxies seen here has a different structure.

MGC 877 is a beautiful low surface brightness (LSB) barred galaxy that is located 180 million light years away. It spans 1.6 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 90,000 light years. We view it about halfway between edge-on and face-on. I like the galaxy color and the strong dust lane to the right of the core. Numerous star clusters are visible within the disk, especially below the core.

To the lower left of this galaxy is a tiny smudge of stars. In addition, a faint star stream extends to the lower right of the galaxy, past the edge-on galaxy (NGC 876) below. This suggests that perhaps these two galaxies are interacting. But NGC 876 is 10 million light years closer to use, so it is doubtful whether these 2 are interacting at this time. Perhaps they were closer in the past, or maybe the distance estimates are slightly off. I like the strong mid-disk dust lane of NGC 876, which obscures a bright central core.

At the top center of the image is the faint face-on spiral galaxy UGC 1761, which is 15 million light years beyond NGC 877. This bluish galaxy has a fascinating void are to the upper left of the core.

The bright vertical distorted galaxy at the top right of the image, looking almost irregular to me, is NGC 871. This galaxy is much closer at 110 million light years away.

Just below NGC 871 is NGC 870, which is much further away at 800 million light years. Finally, the edge-on galaxy towards the right edge is 2MFG 1771, for which I could find no distance information.