NGC 1532 looks like a nearly edge-on spiral that's been savagely disrupted by dark forces from its small companion toward 11 o'clock, triggering bright blue streaks of star formation in the spiral arms.
We've always seen something like a frog we once found in the swimming pool filter box, executing lazy aquatic ballet manoeuvres, with long legs trailing out and around. Perhaps there's also an element of Jabba the Hutt.
The thumbnail is cropped to just the galaxy.
The main image is here.
The detail in the bright part of the galaxy is adequate, but we're starting to see that the "signature dish" at Placidus is being able to extract sharp detail in the very faintest structure, and we invite your attention to the discrete blue dots in the outermost, almost invisible parts of the spiral arms, and (in the whole image only) in the irregular dwarf galaxy toward 5 o'clock and half way out. There are just hundreds of other small galaxies scattered around the full image.
In the main image (but cropped out of the thumbnail), there is a faint set of diagonal coloured arcs across the lower half, due to brilliant light from upsilon 4 Eridani (well out of field to the bottom right) bouncing off filters. We've done a fair bit of air-brushing to tame these, so please ignore the bottom third of the big image.
Luminance: 12 hrs, RGB: 2 hrs each channel, all in 30 min subs. New moon. Seeing about 2 sec arc. Full field about half a degree. Aspen CG16M on 20" PlaneWave. Processing mostly with GoodLook 64 but evil upsilon 4 Eridani touch-ups with CS5.
This is one of our absolute favourite interacting pairs. Hope you like it too.
Best,
Mike and Trish