
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
930 Westphalia (prov. designation: A920 EE or 1920 GS) is a very dark background asteroid and a slow rotator from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, that measures approximately 36 kilometers (22 miles) in diameter. It was discovered on 10 March 1920, by German astronomer Walter Baade at the Bergedorf Observatory in Hamburg. The carbonaceous C-type asteroid (Ch) has an exceptionally long rotation period of 100.7 hours and is likely spherical in shape. It was named after Westphalia, a region in northwestern Germany.
Orbit and classification
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).