The year 2023 ended with a nice cosmic encounter : a faint comet visited a famous trio of galaxies. The comet is ZTF 2020-V2, a remote object crossing the Solar System over 500 million km from Earth, and the galaxies are the Grus Triplet (namely NGC7582, NGC7590, and NGC7599), located some 60 million light-years away, in the Southern constellation of Grus (the Crane).
On the evening of December 13th, the comet come to nestle in the heart of the trio of galaxies. At least viewed from Earth : you certainly noticed that the galaxies are located one million million times further away (strange enough, a proportion quite similar to that of the encouter of Ceres with the galaxy M100, ocurred 9 months ago...)
And of course we've been there to capture this unusual arrangement... In the picture below, the galaxies display some structures, while the comet shows only the round, fuzzy false nucleus, surrounded by a faint hint of coma.
From left to right, the faint fuzzies visibles here are : galaxies NGC7599 and NGC7590, comet ZTF, and galaxy NGC7582
Photo: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - December 13th, 2023
North is up
