
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
via Wikidata · CC0
300 Geraldina is a large Main belt asteroid. It was discovered by Auguste Charlois on October 3, 1890, in Nice. The origin of the name is unknown. It is orbiting the Sun at a distance of 3.21 AU with a period of 5.74 yr and an eccentricity (ovalness) of 0.057. The orbital plane is tilted at an angle of 0.73° to the plane of the ecliptic.
Light curve analysis based on photometric observations of this asteroid made during 2005 show a rotation period of 6.842±0.001 h with a brightness variation of 0.18 in magnitude.
via Wikipedia infobox
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).