My love affair with spiral galaxies is well documented here on this blog. Of course, I'm biased: I live in one. But some of them demand a little more attention than others, like the oddly off-kilter NGC 2442, aka the Meat Hook Galaxy:
That gorgeous image (click to galactinate, or grab the ginormous 6756 x 5687 pixel version) is from the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and it definitely shows why NGC 2442 is a weird one. The one arm at the bottom is long and stretched out, the top one is thicker and dotted with pink star-forming regions, and the nucleus is way off-center. What the heck happened to this galaxy? Perhaps a close-up by Hubble will help:
[Note: this image is rotated 180° from the one above.] Again, we see lots of red gas clouds glowing, fired up by massive stars forming in them. Interestingly, to me ...
