In the far southern skies is the constellation Piscis Volans, the flying fish. Within Volans lies this galaxy NGC 2442. It is distorted from the more common spiral shape into a meathook appearance. The unusual shape is likely the result of a close encounter with another galaxy not in the field of view. The galaxy lies about 50 million light years away. Visible are darkened dust lanes, young blueish star clusters, and reddish star forming regions. More views are from Astronomy Picture of the Day here, here, and here.

I tried my hand at producing a color version of the Meathook galaxy using 3 greyscale images from the Hubble Telescope. The process is described in this previous post. The Hubble images provide rich detail.
