Through Light and Time (2026)

21/06/2026

NGC 6769, 6770 and 6771 — the Devil's Mask, a bound triplet locked in mutual distortion as stripped stars and gas knit a common envelope across the pair

NGC 6769, NGC 6770 and NGC 6771 form a strongly interacting triplet in the southern constellation Pavo, listed as VV 304 in the Vorontsov-Velyaminov atlas and the brightest members of the IC 4845 group, LGG 427
At a distance of ~199 million light-years, the system pairs two roughly equal face-on spirals, NGC 6769, a tightly wound SAB(r)b peculiar spiral at upper right at apparent magnitude V 12.6, and NGC 6770, an SBb peculiar spiral at upper left with a LINER active nucleus, while NGC 6771 lies below as an SB0-a lenticular about half as bright, seen nearly edge-on; recession velocities cluster near 3800 kilometers per second for the upper pair and around 4400 for NGC 6771, confirming a genuine physical association
The two spirals are so close that gravity has torn stars and gas from both disks and spread the stripped debris into a single faint luminous envelope wrapping the pair — and it is this apparition that names the system, for the shared halo arcs over the two glowing bulges like a brow above a pair of eyes, lending the interacting pair the eerie symmetry of a face staring out of the dark, a resemblance the European Southern Observatory captured in 2004 when it dubbed the triplet the Devil's Mask
Bright blue OB associations and pink HII complexes trace the arms of both spirals, the signature of star formation triggered by the encounter, while a faint tidal plume drifts downward toward NGC 6771 and hints at the tenuous bridge linking all three; below them, NGC 6771 shows a warm edge-on disk anchored by a distinctly boxy bulge — a rare morphology, the dynamical fingerprint of a bar seen edge-on and of vertical heating from past interactions
Stretched by the encounter to an ESO-LV blue diameter of 6.6 arcminutes, NGC 6769 alone spans roughly 384,000 light-years, nearly four times the Milky Way, a measure of how far tidal forces can distend a galaxy and a textbook stage of a slow merger caught midway between three independent disks and the single remnant they may one day become

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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18/06/2026

NGC 5916, 5915 and 5916A — a gravitationally bound triplet in Libra caught mid-interaction, one disk flung into a sweeping tidal arm while its neighbors look on

NGC 5916, NGC 5915 and NGC 5916A form a physically associated triplet of interacting galaxies in the constellation Libra, their mutual gravity already at work distorting disks and drawing out tidal material
At a distance of approximately 120 million light-years, the group gathers three very different systems: NGC 5916, the largest, an SB(rs)a peculiar barred spiral at upper right spanning an RC3 diameter of 3.2 arcminutes, about 113,000 light-years across; NGC 5915, an SB(s)ab peculiar barred spiral of apparent magnitude V 12.3 at lower right, roughly 55,000 light-years across; and NGC 5916A, also catalogued as PGC 54779, the small elongated member at lower left, about 48,000 light-years across — the recession velocities of the two NGC members agree closely, 2323 and 2272 kilometers per second, confirming the triplet as a genuine bound association rather than a chance line-of-sight grouping
The most arresting member sits at lower right, NGC 5915, a face-on spiral whose disk has been visibly wrenched by the encounter: a bright knot of pink HII regions and blue star clusters marks a starburst core, while a single luminous arm sweeps up and over the disk in a great curving plume — the unmistakable signature of tidal forces tugging on a thin, rotating disk, and the reason both NGC members carry the peculiar designation
By contrast NGC 5916 at upper right retains a more ordered form, an inclined barred spiral with a warm bulge and dust-laced arms threaded by knots of blue star formation, while NGC 5916A at lower left shows a softer, more diffuse body with a faint surrounding envelope — three galaxies illustrating how differently disks of different mass and structure respond to the same gravitational perturbation
Bright OB associations and pink emission knots trace ongoing, interaction-triggered star formation across the brighter members, and faint tidal debris drifts between them in the deep exposure, the early bridges and streams that mark the opening act of a slow gravitational entanglement
The surrounding frame is scattered with far more distant galaxies of every type, but the eye stays with the triplet itself — a compact stage of galactic interaction caught in the act, three independent disks that gravity has bound into a single unfolding encounter

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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13/06/2026

An edge-on island in Virgo — 600 globular clusters strung along its rim

NGC 5170 is a large, nearby edge-on spiral galaxy in the equatorial constellation of Virgo, classified morphologically as SA(s)c: sp — an unbarred spiral with loosely wound arms, viewed almost exactly through its disk plane
The galaxy lies at an NED mean redshift-independent distance of 26.80 ± 1.49 Mpc, approximately 87.4 million light-years, with a heliocentric recession velocity of 1,501 km/s — its ESO-LV "Quick Blue" angular diameter of 11.5 arcminutes corresponds to a derived physical diameter of about 89.9 kpc, roughly 293,000 light-years across, nearly three times the disk of the Milky Way — it shines at apparent visual magnitude 12.4, with an absolute magnitude of −21.6 marking it as a luminous, massive galactic system, and its disk is tilted at roughly 86° to our line of sight, producing the knife-edge profile that defines its visual character
The structural signature of NGC 5170 is its long, broad equatorial dust lane bisecting a luminous yellow bulge and an extended thin disk — faint warping is visible at the outer extremities, where the disk flares slightly out of the equatorial plane, a feature characteristic of isolated, low-surface-brightness spirals with massive dark halos — blue knots of ongoing star formation populate the disk, particularly toward the northwestern tip, where younger stellar populations and HII regions break through the absorbing dust, sustaining a measured star formation rate of about 1.37 solar masses per year, more than double the Milky Way's current rate
The lenticular galaxy pair near the upper edge of the field and the smaller elliptical companions scattered across the frame belong to the same projected region of the Virgo II Groups, a chain of galaxies and small clusters trailing southward from the Virgo Supercluster
NGC 5170 sits at high galactic latitude (b ≈ +44°), giving it an unusually clean foreground free of Milky Way stars — this transparency has made it a target of choice for studies of its globular cluster system, which numerical and HST imaging studies estimate at approximately 600 ± 100 globulars, far richer than the Milky Way's roughly 150 — the galaxy is also notable for its massive dark halo of around 3.4 × 10¹² solar masses and its thin, low-surface-brightness disk, modeled as one of the cleanest examples of a quiescent, dynamically cold spiral in the local universe

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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08/06/2026

Blue light scattered, red light buried, stars forming in the dust of their own birth cloud

VdB 123 is a blue reflection nebula in Serpens Cauda, embedded within the dark folds of the Serpens Molecular Cloud, one of the nearest and most active low-mass star-forming regions in the sky. Catalogued by Canadian astronomer Sidney van den Bergh in his 1966 survey, it is illuminated by the 9.75-magnitude B7V star HD 170634, whose blue-white light is scattered by surrounding interstellar grains in the same way our daytime sky scatters sunlight toward blue
The Serpens cloud lies at a directly measured distance of roughly 1,400 light-years, established through VLBI trigonometric parallax of young stars embedded in the Serpens Core rather than indirect spectroscopic estimates that long made this distance one of the more contested figures in the literature. The nebular complex spans a field of order one degree on the sky, corresponding to a physical extent of tens of light-years at this distance, threaded throughout by the dense obscuring dust of the molecular cloud
The frame is a study in contrast between two illumination mechanisms. At left, HD 170634 sits within the cool blue glow of VdB 123, the classic signature of dust scattering shorter wavelengths most efficiently. To the upper right, a warm golden-toned bipolar nebulosity glows from light that has been heavily reddened as it filters through the densest dust, this is the Serpens Reflection Nebula, illuminated by the deeply embedded pre-main-sequence star SVS 2. The intervening dark lanes are not empty space but cold opaque molecular gas, cataloged among the dense Serpens dust structures, silhouetting the rich Milky Way star field behind
The clustered knots of nebulosity in the upper portion of the field mark a true cradle of star formation, the same region where the James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged a grouping of aligned protostellar outflow jets emerging from newborn stars. Bipolar outflows here, including those associated with SVS 2, trace the magnetically collimated ejection of material as protostars accrete and grow
What makes this region scientifically compelling is that it captures star formation in the act, the blue reflection nebula lit by an already-formed B star, the reddened bipolar source marking a protostar still buried in its natal dust, and the dark cloud itself holding the reservoir of gas from which the next generation of stars will condense, all within a single frame

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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05/06/2026

A barred spiral pulled out of shape — the lopsided "Sea Slug" of the Virgo II Groups

NGC 4731 is a distorted late-type barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo, classified as SB(s)cd — a system with a strong, elongated central bar, no inner ring, and loosely wound spiral arms emerging from the bar ends. Its appearance is striking and unmistakably disturbed, with the two arms developing in profoundly asymmetric fashion under the influence of past or ongoing gravitational interaction. The galaxy hosts a low-luminosity active nucleus and is catalogued as a Seyfert 2 system.
Located at a Hubble-flow distance of approximately 88 million light-years, NGC 4731 spans about 162,000 light-years across, with an apparent angular size of roughly 6.3 × 2.1 arcminutes and an apparent blue magnitude near 12.0. Its inclination of around 71 degrees presents the disk at a moderate tilt that emphasises the elongation of its bar and the dramatic divergence of its outer arms.
The structure is dominated by a long, luminous central bar that runs across the inner disk, threaded with knotty dust lanes and punctuated by bright pink H II regions marking active star formation at the bar's tangent points and along its leading edges. From the northeast end of the bar, a thin, almost straight stellar filament extends far outward before bending gently back — a striking signature of tidal stretching. The opposite arm, emerging from the southwest end of the bar, is broader and more diffuse, fanning out into a soft, shell-like outer envelope that fades into a faint halo of disturbed disk material. Scattered blue knots of young stars and pink emission complexes populate both arms, while the underlying disk shows an asymmetric brightness distribution consistent with a system whose dynamics have been substantially reshaped.
NGC 4731 belongs to the NGC 4697 Group, part of the Virgo II Groups extending southward from the Virgo Supercluster. Its small irregular companion NGC 4731A lies just outside this field of view to the south, and gravitational interactions with that companion — as well as with the nearby galaxy NGC 4967 — are thought to be responsible for the galaxy's extraordinary tidal asymmetry and the unusually extended, lopsided arms that give it its informal nickname, the "Sea Slug."
In NGC 4731 we see a galaxy mid-transformation — its bar still driving gas inward to fuel star formation and a modest active nucleus, while its outer disk is simultaneously being stretched, torqued, and reorganised by external gravitational forces. The result is a system caught between secular bar-driven evolution and externally driven tidal sculpting, illustrating how barred spirals in group environments can develop the most extreme and beautifully irregular morphologies in the local universe.

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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02/06/2026

Between order and asymmetry, a spiral in transition

NGC 4219 is a spiral galaxy in Centaurus, classified as SA(s)bc, but it does not display the clean, organized arm structure often associated with that type. Seen at a strong inclination, the galaxy appears elongated and unsettled, with a disk that feels only partly coherent rather than neatly ordered. Its apparent size is 3.7 × 1.1 arcminutes, and at a distance of about 72 million light-years it spans roughly 111,000 light-years
What makes this system especially interesting is the character of its outer disk. The spiral pattern is weak and fragmented, and there are relatively few obvious star-forming regions for a galaxy of this class. The blue stellar concentrations that are present do not trace strong, continuous arms, but instead appear in unusual, offset positions, giving the outer structure a displaced and slightly uneasy appearance. Rather than a luminous grand-design spiral, NGC 4219 looks more like a galaxy whose gas and star formation have become patchy, uneven, and only loosely connected to the underlying spiral geometry
There is also a subtle asymmetry in the galaxy’s outer envelope. One side appears more diffuse and extended, with faint low-surface-brightness structure that suggests the stellar disk is not fully balanced. The dust pattern is weak, the arm contrast is low, and the central regions remain brighter and smoother than the outer disk, reinforcing the impression of a large spiral system whose structure has been shaped more by mild disturbance or internal unevenness than by strong, orderly density waves.
NGC 4219 is a reminder that spiral galaxies are not always elegant, symmetric systems. Some, like this one, occupy a more ambiguous state—still recognizably spiral, yet marked by sparse star formation, fragmented structure, and a disk that hints at a more complex dynamical history

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500 Camera Moravian C5A150M at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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01/06/2026

I am really pleased to be part of this amazing event. It is open to astrophotographers throughout the world. Entries are open from 15 June. Don't be shy, give it a try !

31/05/2026

A giant edge-on lenticular, NGC 5084 cuts across Virgo like a warped blade of starlight

NGC 5084 is a lenticular galaxy (S0 edge-on) in the constellation Virgo, located about 146 million light-years away. Its apparent size is approximately 9.3 × 1.7 arcminutes, corresponding to a physical span of roughly 395,000 × 72,000 light-years, marking it as an exceptionally large and massive disk-dominated system. At an apparent magnitude of around 10.5, it presents a striking edge-on profile with a brilliant central bulge embedded in a vast, flattened stellar disk
Although classified as a lenticular, NGC 5084 is far from a simple smooth system. Its disk appears subtly warped and asymmetric, with faint outer extensions and irregular structure that suggest a long dynamical history shaped by accretion or past gravitational interaction. Along the outer edges, there also appear to be localized bluish star-forming regions and young stellar concentrations, adding an unexpected hint of residual activity to a galaxy type often thought of as more quiescent. That contrast—between an old, dominant stellar disk and pockets of younger structure—makes the system especially compelling
Also visible in the field is NGC 5087, an early-type lenticular galaxy (SA0?) located about 86 million light-years away. With an apparent size of roughly 2.5 × 2.2 arcminutes, it spans about 31,000 × 28,000 light-years, appearing compact and smooth beside the immense, razor-thin form of NGC 5084. The scene captures two very different expressions of galaxy evolution in the same region of space: one dominated by an enormous flattened stellar disk, the other by the smooth light profile of an early-type system
NGC 5084 is a galaxy defined not by flamboyant spiral arms, but by scale, geometry, and quiet structural drama—a system that looks almost impossibly long and thin, yet carries the mass and complexity of a truly enormous galactic structure

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500 Camera Moravian C5A150M at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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29/05/2026

NGC 5286 — one of the Milky Way's most ancient globular clusters, a 12.5-billion-year-old relic likely torn from a dwarf galaxy swallowed long ago

NGC 5286, also catalogued as Caldwell 84, is a class V globular cluster in the southern constellation Centaurus, a gravitationally bound swarm of several hundred thousand stars discovered by James Dunlop in 1827 and lying just 4 arcminutes north of the naked-eye star M Centauri
At a distance of about 35,900 light-years, with an apparent diameter of 9.1 arcminutes and an integrated apparent magnitude of V 7.6, the cluster measures roughly 95 light-years across and holds a mass near 710,000 times that of the Sun; it sits about 29,000 light-years from the Galactic Center, orbiting through the Milky Way's halo with a metal-poor composition of [Fe/H] −1.41, only a few percent of the Sun's heavy-element content
The cluster is fully resolved here from its dense, slightly elongated core out into the sparse outer halo, the stellar population spread across a rich range of color — hot blue horizontal-branch stars mingling with the warm yellow and orange-red light of evolved red giants, the chromatic fingerprint of an ancient, chemically primitive population that formed in the early universe
At an estimated 12.5 billion years old, NGC 5286 ranks among the oldest globular clusters known in the Milky Way, and its halo orbit and chemistry tie it to the Gaia-Enceladus event — the merger of a substantial dwarf galaxy with the young Milky Way, from which this cluster was most likely accreted rather than born within our own Galaxy
Studies have even hinted at an intermediate-mass black hole of less than 6,000 solar masses lurking in its core, the kind of object that may bridge the gap between stellar-mass black holes and the supermassive giants at galactic centers
The brilliant blue-white star anchoring the upper right field is a foreground Milky Way star, far closer than the cluster itself, while the surrounding sky is dusted with the more distant stars of Centaurus — but the eye is held by the ancient swarm at the center, a fossil of galactic assembly still wheeling through the halo after twelve and a half billion years

Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby
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26/05/2026

Why Settle for Two Arms — NGC 5054 Has Three

NGC 5054 is a face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo, classified morphologically as SA(s)bc — an unbarred grand-design spiral with moderately wound arms and a small inner ring structure, hosting an elliptical bulge whose elongation traces a nuclear bar embedded deep within the core
The galaxy lies approximately 55 million light-years away based on redshift-independent measurements compiled in NED, with a heliocentric recession velocity of 1,742 km/s placing it within the local supercluster region, and its apparent optical dimensions of 5.1 by 3.0 arcminutes correspond to a true physical diameter of roughly 85,000 light-years at visual magnitude 10.9
What sets NGC 5054 apart is its rare three-arm grand-design morphology — three prominent spiral arms emerge from the inner disk separated by roughly 120 degrees, with the northern arm more tightly wrapped than its counterparts, each arm carrying a chain of bright HII regions and dust filaments traceable for about half a revolution before fading, and a delicate inner ring formed where the arms anchor to the bulge encircles the bright nucleus and its embedded nuclear bar
The galaxy is actively forming stars at an estimated rate of 2.6 solar masses per year, with the largest HII complexes in the spiral arms reaching about two arcseconds across — visible in this image as the chains of pink and blue knots tracing the arm structure — and at its heart lies a supermassive black hole with a mass estimated between 1.8 and 9.5 million solar masses derived from the pitch angle of the spiral arms themselves, a geometric relationship that links the tightness of a galaxy's spirals to the gravitational dominance of its central black hole
On 21 February 2004, Berto Monard discovered SN 2004ab in NGC 5054 — a Type Ia supernova that reached magnitude 14.7 about a week past maximum light, the explosion of a white dwarf in a binary system that briefly outshone billions of the galaxy's stars and offered another anchor point in the network of distance measurements that calibrate the expansion of the universe
NGC 5054 is a confirmed member of the NGC 5044 Group, a loose southern extension of the Virgo galaxy concentration anchored by the giant elliptical NGC 5044 and including roughly fifty catalogued spirals and dwarfs scattered across more than a degree of sky, with the small blue edge-on companion MCG-03-34-040 perched directly above the disk in this frame along with several fainter background galaxies hinting at the rich extragalactic environment of the region
Three-armed grand-design spirals are uncommon — most disks settle into two-arm symmetry driven by their density-wave modes — so NGC 5054 stands as one of the cleanest symmetric examples of the morphology, a reminder that spiral galaxies still hold geometric surprises hidden 55 million light-years deep
Imaged in LRGB on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile

Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby

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