This faint tiny object, nicknamed the Penguin and Egg, is a pair of disturbed interacting galaxies located 300 million light years away in the constellation of Hydra at a declination of +3 degrees.
The image looks like a peaceful image of a penguin guarding its egg, but is really a violent collision and merger between two galaxies. The larger galaxy on the right (NGC 2936, the Penguin) is a disturbed and severely distorted spiral galaxy. This galaxy is slightly larger than our Milky Way, at 140,000 lightyears in diameter. The core of the galaxy is yellow, which is adjacent to long deformed brown dust lane. The distorted arms contain bluish star clusters indicative of star formation initiated by disturbance. The brightest blue star cluster is at the end of the Penguin's beak.
The elliptical galaxy companion (NGC 2937, the Egg) is at lower left. It is about 70,000 light years in length. The stars of this companion galaxy have been distorted from their likely original spherical shape. The entire galaxy contains yellow stars, which is typical of these older elliptical galaxies.
Studying the image closely, I like the faint tidal star streams which flow from and to each of the galaxies. The two most evident ones are up from the top of the elliptical galaxy, and down to the lower right from the spiral galaxy.
Slightly above and to the right of the pair, an unrelated bluish galaxy (PGC 1237172) appears to be an elongated edge-on spiral. This galaxy is only 70% of the distance of the pair from us and is not physically related to them. It just happens to lie along the same line of sight in the foreground. This galaxy is about 45,000 light years in diameter.
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This object is one of many included in both of my free astrophotography targeting tools:
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Imm Deep Sky Compendium (detailed Excel spreadsheet prioritizing 3100 targets based on time, your location, and moon location)
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Top 750 DSOs (simpler pdf tool for quickly seeing what is overhead on each night of the year)
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