UGC 6138 (2014)

Moving right along: Galaxy number four of six from Proposal 10550! Lovely spiral structures to this one and also a nice contrast with a background edge-on galaxy seen straight through the galactic nucleus. Look at how bright the background galaxy is compared to it. I am only just beginning to learn how dark matter possibly takes up residence in the centers of these low-surface-brightness galaxies as opposed to mainly the halo of normal galaxies. I’m also still trying to understand if these can be called dwarf galaxies. Sometimes you can’t just look at something and drop it easily into a category or two.

Speaking of background galaxies, my favorite part about this image are these faint fuzzies. On the left side of the field is a three-armed galaxy (cropped, close-up here) the likes of which I have never seen before. I’ve seen other pictures of them but they’re usually jumbled and barely discernible as having three arms. For this one, there is no question. It’s almost perfect and it even looks triangular.

In the upper right corner is a galaxy which looks exactly like a baby crocodile head.

The chip gap is here to torment me again. I’ve filled it with somewhat blurry, noisy fake data to keep the distraction minimal. As always, it is not blended with real data. The line between the fake data in the gap and the real data is a hard one.

Red: HST_10550_04_ACS_WFC_F775W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_10550_04_ACS_WFC_F475W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 29.5° clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.