| Description | This is an attractive barred spiral galaxy, probably SBb following the Hubble classification scheme. Categorized by Arp as a galaxy with SMALL, high surface brightness companions, the first task is to decide what small objects are galaxies and which are stars. For this I relied mostly on my own inverted image (second in the gallery). In my analysis, the only object I can identify reliably as a galaxy is the object towards the bottom center of the image. The broad sweep of the northern arm points to it and seems to make contact (or nearly so). The next object at the same level to the right (southward) is possibly a small galaxy, but given the noise in this image I can't be sure. There are two additional objects that appear in my inverted image to be dim galaxy smudges: one in the far NW (lower left) corner, and the other to the far south (right) border even with the top of the disk. Neither seems to interact with Arp 73. The remaining bright objects, all even with or above the disk, including the binary pair, appear to be field stars. |
