NGC 520

Click on image for larger version.

Galactic police would have a difficult time trying to determine which of these two galaxies caused the collision. At an estimated distance of 100 million light years away the light that we now recieve took a siginicant time compared to how quickly the shape of this interaction is evolving. Most likely the tidal tails of this pair have grown dramatically and perhaps even more star formation is taking place in the heart of of the mass. Note the dusty foreground dust lanes and the galaxies that are severely reddened (bottom left tail). Another similar example of colliding galaxies is NGC 4038.

Equipment

20in RC Optical Systems telescope Operating at f/8.4
Paramount ME Robotic Telescope Mount
SBIG ST10XME CCD camera with color filter wheel

L R G B color production was used to create this image.

Luminance = 75 minutes binned 1x1
 Red = 15 minutes binned 2x2
 Green = 15 minutes binned 2x2
 Blue = 15 minutes binned 2x2
  • One iteration of L-R deconvolution (sharpening) algorithm using CCDsharp was applied to the luminance image.

  • Digital Development (DDP) via Maxim/DL was also used in order to display the the very dim and very bright details of the image simultaneously.

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    Minimum credit line: Jeff Newton/Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF

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    Updated: 12/19/2003