This is an image I compiled and developed of galaxies in a river dance. The large, distorted galaxy is NGC 1532, also known as Haley’s Coronet, about 50 million light-years (LY) from the earth, in the southern hemisphere constellation of Eridanus (the River). The galaxy immediately to its right is NGC 1531, and unlike the other galaxies in the image, is as close to NGC 1532 as it looks. The gravitational forces exerted by NGC 1531 are pulling whole galactic spiral arms up from its larger neighbor, but it is destined to ultimately be absorbed into the larger galaxy. Meanwhile, the conflict between the two galaxies is creating the right conditions to encourage the molecular clouds in NGC 1532 to collapse into one another, forming thousands or even millions of stars, as evidenced by the red emissions around its core. There are quite a few other galaxies in this image, some appearing as obvious elongated fuzzy, glowing objects, that are about 30-50 million LY from us. The stars in our galaxy seen here generally have four spikes created by the secondary support arms of the telescope. Most of the rest of the small glowing dots and particularly those that look a bit fuzzy, are galaxies that are hundreds to thousands of millions of LY from us. The bright star in the upper left is HD 26799, about 305 LY away.
The data for this image was collected through a Planewave CDK 24 telescope, with an aperture of 24 inches (610mm) and a focal length of about four meters, using an FLI PL9000 camera, on a Mathis M1-1000/1250 mount belonging to Telescope.Net at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. It is composed of a series of 110, 600 sec. exposures through luminance, red, green, and blue filters, for a total integration time of 11 hours taken from September through