This image consists of 2 objects, the beautiful galaxy NGC 1097 on the left and the molecular cloud CO 225.5-66.3 on the right, located in the southern constellation of Fornax at a declination of -31 degrees.   

NGC 1097, also known as Arp 77, is a barred spiral grand design galaxy located 50 million light-years away. It spans about 9 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 150,000 light years. The galaxy orientation is about 45 degrees to our line of sight, midway between face-on and edge-on.

Immediately surrounding the core is an unusually bright star-forming ring. Spiraling out from the ring are two dark dust lanes, which each transition to the end of the bar and the beginning of a spiral arm. The two long arms stream out from opposite ends of the core for about 180 degrees. 

The small companion galaxy 1097A is located just above and to the right of the subject galaxy. Dr. Arp classified this galaxy in the category of “Spiral galaxies with Small High Surface Brightness Companions”. One of the subject galaxy's arms has wrapped around the companion, 40,000 light-years from the main galaxy's core. Gravitational interactions with the companion appear to be distorting the main galaxy arm. It also appears that there could be increased star generation in this vicinity, when comparing it against the same region on the opposite side.

I captured this object previously with my long focal length C11. Despite the 2.5x longer integration time of that effort, I was not able to capture the galaxy jets then as this image has.  Looking on the inverted Astrobin view of this image (select View and then Inverted Monochrome), one of the “dogleg jets” is visible which stream from the galaxy up and to the left.   This “jet” is actually a star stream like that of the Umbrella Galaxy.  This feature, along with fainter streams which are tough to see in my image, are believed to be the remnants of a merged galaxy.

On the right side of the image is the molecular cloud CO 225.5-66.3, also known as HRK 225-66.  I saw this object while scanning the sky with the Aladin sky atlas program. It reminds me a bit of an inverted version of the Skeleton Hand image of my last post. The cloud is a very faint feature and little is known about it.    I have included this object in my Astrobin Collection of Molecular Clouds.