NGC 7727, Irregular Galaxy in Aquarius

NGC 7727, Irregular Galaxy This object is located at a distance of 76 million light years in the constellation Aquarius. It has a peculiar aspect, with several plumes and streams of irregular shape being classified as a galaxy with amorphous spiral arms. In all likelihood, this system is the product of the merger of two previous spiral galaxies that took place 1 billion years ago^.  with the  stellar plumes and streams being the remnants of the disks of the two galaxies that collided to form this object. If you look closely there are some star like objects in the center which are probably the remnants of the centers of the original galaxies.  Twenty three other objects–candidates to be young globular clusters formed in the collision–can be found in this system. It will most likely become an elliptical galaxy in the distant future. You can also see NGC 7724 in the upper right of the image. In the sky it is about 7 arc minutes in size which is about a fourth of the size of the moon. This means that at a distance of 76 million light years it is 166,000 light years in actual size which is larger than the  Milky Way which is 110,000 light years in size.

The raw images were taken in Rio Hurtado Chile and involve 76 subimages taken over 21 hours. The color in the image was calibrated by photometric color calibration in Pixinsight which corrects the color based on analyzing the known color of the stars in the image.