
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
729 Watsonia is a rare-type asteroid and namesake of the Watsonia family from the central region of the asteroid belt. It was named after the Canadian-American astronomer James C. Watson. Watsonia occulted the star 54 Leonis (HIP 53417, a 4.3 Magnitude Star) on 2013 Mar 03 at 01:48.
Description
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).