NGC772, The Nautilus Galaxy

Tried to get a din galaxy, something I havent tried to do in awhile.  These objects typically take a lot of exposures to get them to come out well.  This image however was taken using only 8 frames.  I had clouds move in which cut my session short.

What you see here is a really large spiral galaxy, about twice the size of the Milky Way, but its about 130 million light years away. The light we are seeing left this galaxy during a time when early dinosaurs were roaming the Earth, when the first freshwater turtles appeared on Earth.  The distorted spiral arm was caused by interaction with one of the fuzzy specks to the right of the galaxy, another satellite galaxy.