The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.

— Anaxagoras 428 BC

Barred and twisted

Barred and twisted

A shot of NGC 7479 from Whiting NJ. Gene just fell a tree that was blocking a large part of his Eastern sky. The tree was sacrificed in the name of astrophotograpy, even though Gene claims otherwise. This image was taken from a nearby patch of grass.   The image is an LRGB composite for a total of 1/2 hour exposure through a 5" f7 refractor.This galaxy is also known as Herschel 55-1. Here is a blurb from Wikipedia:   NGC 7479 is a barred spiral galaxy discovered by William Herschel in 1784, about 105 million light-years away. Supernovae SN 1990U and SN2009jf occurred in NGC 7479. NGC 7479 is also recognized as a Seyfert galaxy undergoing starburst activity in the nucleus and the outer arms (Kohno, 2007 ). Polarization studies of this galaxy indicate it recently underwent a minor merger and that it is unique in the radio continuum with arms opening in an opposite direction to the optical arms (Laine, 2005).