
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
815 Coppelia is a minor planet orbiting the Sun that was discovered by German astronomer Max Wolf on 2 February 1916 from Heidelberg named after Coppélia, a comic ballet.
Photometric observations of this asteroid at the Rozhen Observatory in Bulgaria during 2010 gave a light curve with a period of 4.4565 hours and a brightness variation of 0.24 in magnitude. This is consistent with a period of 4.421 hours and an amplitude of 0.27 obtained during a 2006 study.
via Wikipedia infobox
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).