An increasingly popular target among amateur astronomers, NGC 772 is a somewhat unique spiral galaxy which seems to be disturbed by one of its companions, NGC 770. It’s also the 78th entry in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (Arp 78).

Hubble took this closeup in part of a study to measure the masses of black holes in galaxies.

When I was in primary school, I hit my astronomy obsession full-speed. Part of that consisted of a ridiculous desire to learn about every known space object - I really didn’t have a full grasp of scale yet. Though the goal was outlandish, it actually helped me learn quite a bit rather quickly. By the sixth grade I was pretty familiar with approximately the first 2000 objects of the New General Catalogue (a shift in interests has led to me forgetting quite a bit that was never useful) and NGC 772 was one of my favourite. At around that time I had even amassed a digital collection of almost every published Hubble image, but it would still be a while until I learned about the public archive.

I was never really sure what I was going to do with all of this information, but I knew that above all else, it fed my curiosity and greatly intrigued me. I’ve felt similarly about other things in my life, but astronomy has been a pretty consistent interest of mine. My high school is without an astronomy program, which is unfortunate.

I don’t think I did this data justice and I strongly encourage any other processors to check it out (this goes for pretty much everything I share). I feel a little bad about being the first to process it, but it’s still exciting to find stuff.

Star-forming regions and dust have been sharpened and emphasised.

Morphological type: SBb

Red: WFC3/IR F160W Green: WFC3/UVIS F814W