

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
256 Walpurga is a large Main belt asteroid. It was discovered by Johann Palisa on 3 April 1886 in Vienna and was named after Saint Walburga.
Photometric observations at the Oakley Observatory in Terre Haute, Indiana, during 2007 were used to build a light curve for this asteroid. The asteroid displayed a rotation period of 16.64 ± 0.02 hours and a brightness variation of 0.38 ± 0.02 in magnitude.
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).