NGC 660 – A Polar Ring Galaxy

This is the only decent image I was able to get on a trip to Ghost Ranch in the fall of 2021 for an art retreat Christi was participating in. We were there for a week and during the day, the sky would mostly be clear blue. But at night clouds and rain would roll in, save for a single night when I was able to grab this shot. That trip made me realize that dragging 500lbs of telescope gear 600+ miles across the country was more of a young person’s game. At that point, the seeds of placing telescopes in permanent homes at remote observatories germinated in my head.

NGC 660, 45 million light years away in Pisces, is a very rare polar-ring galaxy. Only a baker’s dozen of them have ever been discovered.

It’s the merger of two galaxies that collided about a billion years ago at an oblique angle. The dust, gas, and stars continue to circle the common center at different angles, leading to the X shape of the two major dust lanes visible near the center with the larger galaxy forming what appears to be a ring around the central bulge. The ring itself is not actually visible, though.

The initial collision of the two galaxies triggered a maelstrom of new star-forming activity, a high proportion of which were massive stars with short lives. When those stars died in supernova explosions, that created shock waves that triggered even more star formation—a process that continues in this galaxy even now.