MCG+12-02-001/PGC 3182 is a major train wreck of two galaxies about 200 million light-years from us in northern Cassiopeia. NED classifies each as E? pec and as LIRG (Luminous InfraRed Galaxies). There is so much dust that these came out super red when I processed them. Very little blue was seen in either except near the cores. An artificial color image by the HST shows what appear to be expected colors without the dust. I assume they made severe adjustments for the dust. I looked up the IR and blue frames used on the HST site and the result was the same color I was getting. I normally don't adjust one part of an image to get a galaxy or whatever "right". I normally adjust the entire frame based on the stars using eXcalibrator. The HST image and text about it can be found here: http://hubblesite.org/image/2330/news_release/2008-16 Their version has south at the top while I put north at the top. They give a distance of 200 million light-years or 50 million parsecs. It appears they rounded that to one significant digit. NED's redshift puts it at about 210 million light-years using my usual two significant digits. One highly suspect Tully-Fisher measurement says 42 million parsecs which works out to be 140 million light-years. NASA's 50 million parsecs is 160 million light-years which is close to the T-F measurement while the light-year figure agrees well with the redshift measurement. In other words, we don't really know its distance very well at all.

These are not very large galaxies even all spread out by the collision. Assuming a distance of 200 million light-years the lower (southern) galaxy is a tad over 50,000 light-years across and the upper 60 million light-years across its much wider but far less populated plumes. Obviously before the collision both were much smaller with the southern one probably larger. It's higher mass helping to hold its plumes in check while the lower mass of the northern galaxy allowed it to be pretty well torn apart and spread all over. At least that's what I saw back in the early 1980's when I ran simplified galaxy collisions on what passed for a powerful computer of the day.

This far north and deep in the Zone of Avoidance there is no useful data on anything else in the image so no annotated image was prepared.

After seeing the initial 10 frames I realized this one was so obscured I needed more data so ran it a second time for twice my usual data. It could have used even more.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10 RGB=4x10, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME