February 7, 2025
The night sky on your birthday is never quite the same twice — the planets shift, the constellations drift, the Moon wears a different phase.
LEDA 1313424: The Bullseye Galaxy
Birthday · February 7, 2025
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APOD published February 7, 2025. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
The giant galaxy cataloged as LEDA 1313424 is about two and a half times the size of our own Milky Way. Its remarkable appearance in this recently released Hubble Space Telescope image strongly suggests its nickname "The Bullseye Galaxy". Known as a collisional ring galaxy it has nine rings confirmed by telescopic observations, rippling from its center like waves from a pebble dropped into a pond. Of course, the pebble dropped into the Bullseye galaxy was a galaxy itself. Telescopic observations identify the blue dwarf galaxy at center-left as the likely collider, passing through the giant galaxy's center and forming concentric rings in the wake of their gravitational interaction. The Bullseye Galaxy lies some 567 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces. At that distance, this stunning Hubble image would span about 530,000 light-years.