
NGC 3660 and Burçin's Galaxy
2026-05-26
The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual. The galaxy up top is NGC 3660, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy in that it has several bright blue spiral arms and a central bar of stars, dust, and gas. Captured by chance in the featured deep and colorful image, surprisingly, is SN 2026cff, a supernova found just to the right of the central bar. Farther in the distance is the bottom galaxy, known informally as Burçin’s galaxy, but formally cataloged as LEDA 1000714. The center of this galaxy appears to be an old elliptical galaxy, but it is strangely surrounded by not one but two rings of stars. What created Burçin's galaxy is a mystery and remains a continuing topic of research, but it likely involves the accretion of one or more smaller galaxies.
via NASA APOD
1836 Komarov (1971 OT)
via NASA/JPL Small-Body Database
1836 Komarov (prov. designation: 1971 OT) is a carbonaceous Dorian asteroid from the central region of the asteroid belt, approximately 22 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 26 July 1971 by Russian astronomer Nikolai Chernykh at Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnij on the Crimean peninsula. It was named after Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov.
Classification and orbit
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).