This Astrobin Debut Object is a trio of galaxies located in the constellation of Virgo at a declination of +5 degrees. In his Arp catalog, Dr. Arp classified this object into the category of Double Galaxies with Connected Arms. Arp's notes indicated that he had good seeing for his image, which is reflected in his nice amount of detail.

It is unusual to see 2 grand design spiral galaxies (i.e., each with 2 strong symmetric arms) so close together visually. The large yellow galaxy is NGC 5679, located 410 million light years away. This magnitude 14 galaxy spans 1 arc-minute in our apparent view, which corresponds to a Milky Way size diameter of 130,000 light years.

To the right of NGC 5679 is the blue galaxy, MCG+01-37-034, located a bit closer to us 350 million light years away. This galaxy has a diameter of 70,000 light years.

The two above galaxies are too far apart to be interacting. This is confirmed by the lack of much disturbance in the arms of the smaller galaxy. I believe that Dr. Arp’s “Connected Arms” classification is incorrect.

The third galaxy in this trio is the small blue galaxy (MCG+01-37-036) on the lower left edge of NGC 5679. No distance information is available for this galaxy. I don’t believe that it is interacting with either larger galaxy, since this galaxy seems fairly undisturbed. The only disturbance I see among the 3 galaxies is some distortion of the right arm of NGC 5679, but there could be other causes of that.

The large faint galaxy towards the lower left corner of the image, UGC 9385, is fascinating to me. Data shows it to be 80 million light years away. It has a bright rectangular central region which is only about 20,000 light years across. Star streams above and below look, with some imagination, to be extended faint spiral arms. So at first glance it seems like it could be a barred grand spiral galaxy. But the overall extent of the galaxy, at about 45,000 light years, seems too small for such an object. So I think that this may be an irregular galaxy with some interesting adjacent star streams that are not actually spiral arm extensions. I hope to revisit this one some day to add time for a better look.