

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
699 Hela is a Mars crossing asteroid. It was discovered on 5 June 1910 at Heidelberg Observatory by German astronomer Joseph Helffrich, and may have been named after Hel, the Norse ruler of the underworld. This asteroid is orbiting the Sun at a distance of 2.61 astronomical units (AU) with a period of 4.22 years and an eccentricity of 0.41. The orbital plane is inclined at an angle of 15.3° to the plane of the ecliptic.
History and naming
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).