Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. The galaxy is named after Arthur Hoag who discovered it in 1950. It contains about 8 billion stars and is roughly 120,000 light years across in distance, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way galaxy.
A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars encircles the yellow nucleus of this ring galaxy. This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures a face-on view of the galaxy's ring of stars, revealing more detail than any previously existing photo of this object. The image may help astronomers unravel clues on how such strange objects form.
The galaxy is 600 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 took this image on July 9, 2001.
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Data acquisition: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA
Data processing: Rudy Pohl
Image: RGB colour
Processing software: Fits Liberator, Photoshop CS5
Processing note:
Unfortunately, the Hubble data files are unbelievably noisy and filled with artifacts. As a result, this little image took me an entire day to process. So unless you are a VERY patient person or you don't have too much else to do with your day, stay away from this one! LOL! Benoit Blanco, one of our Astrobin members came up with an ingenious solution by adapting an Artificial Intelligence-based algorithm to this image and produced an exceptional result which won an APOD from Nasa recently. You can see Benoit's Hoag Object here:
https://www.astrobin.com/skeebg/D/?nc=user
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