My Favorite Galaxy
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My Favorite Galaxy - NGC 938

I have been looking at pictures of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (See http://hubblesite.org/).  Here's part of one of the images that I really like:

As you can see, there are dozens of galaxies in just this small part of the sky (and this image less than 3% of the original image, which can be found at a Caltech web site here; you can also read a description on Wikipedia).

I decided to choose a galaxy as my favorite. So I looked around some databases, and decided to choose NGC 938 as my favorite. That's based on my favorite 3-digit number (see Favorites). Here's a picture:

It's the bright object in the center. There's nothing especially remarkable about this galaxy, and that's partly why I like it. I am probably the first person in the world to choose this as my favorite.  NGC 938 was discovered by Heinrich Ludwig [Louis] d'Arrest on December 30, 1863. He published this discovery in Siderum Nebulosorum Observationes Havnienses (Copenhagen, 1867).

Heinrich Ludwig d'Arrest

NGC 938 is a galaxy about 190,000,000 light years away, if I'm calculating the redshift correctly. I got the data from the Nasa/IPAC Extragalactic Database. I found the image on the SEDS page. There are probably 100,000,000,000 galaxies in our universe, and NGC 938 is just one of them. But I had to choose one of them to be my favorite, so I decided it might as well be the one that's numbered with my favorite three-digit number. There are many different lists of objects in the sky, I just chose the NGC ("New General Catalogue") list arbitrarily.

 

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Created and maintained by Matthew Weathers. Last updated Mar 10, 2008.