| Description | These are truly obscure galaxies. As far as I can tell, Arp 46 is alternatively listed only as UGC 12265, which is from the Upsala Catalog published in 1973. I believe there are TWO "low surface brightness companions" here, and possibly 3, best seen in the featured image which has been enlarged about 3x and rotated so N is up. The first is the small, slightly elongated, bright spot (with galaxy-like halo) to the NNW (top left) of the galactic disk (next to another bright circle, which appears to be a star within the Milky Way). The second is the small dot, with an even fainter halo, at the end of the long, looping tail that starts at the SE end (bottom right) of the central disk and loops all the way up the image so it's due north of the galactic center. Put another way, it's the faint dot at a roughly 45° angle up and to the right of the star in the Milky Way mentioned earlier. By itself, neither my image nor Arp's conclusively demonstrates it's a second companion. The third companion, imo, is at the base of the long looping tail where it connects to the main galaxy. It does look like a small galaxy attached at right angles to the center spiral, possibly which might explain how such a long trail was drawn-out to the far end of the bigger galaxy. |
