This is a 12 minute exposure with
an ST-6 CCD camera thru Kopernik's 20-inch F/8.1 Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain
telescope. The field of view is about 5x7 arc minutes, with north at the
top
NGC 935(top
and brighter object in the image above) and IC
1801, are a pair of closely interacting spiral galaxies that appear to
be in contract and possibly colliding.
This pair is included in Arp’s
catalog of unusual galaxies as ARP 276. Using the red shift data from
the “NASA Extra-galactic Data
Base(NED)”, and a Hubble Constant of 62 Km per sec., per Megaparsec,
one can calculate a rough distance and size for NGC 935 as: Distance =
218 million light years; Diameter = 108,000 light years. IC 1801 has nearly
the same red shift, which shows that both galaxies are at nearly the same
distance.
Both are in the IRAS
catalog of infrared sources, and this indicates massive star formation.
One current theory would suggest that these two are in the process of merging
into a single elliptical galaxy. Some astronomers predict that this is
the fate that awaits the Milky Way and spiral galaxy M-31
in about 5 billion years.
For a larger version, click
here
