Whale or monster? Benign plankton-eating creature? No, a terrifying colossus, a hybrid with gaping jaws and the powerful scaly coils of a sea serpent. This is the constellation Cetus. The monster fell to the hero Perseus, but the stars and deep sky objects are impressive.

Cetus the Sea Monster

The beautiful edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is 60 million light years away in the constellation Cetus. It's a bit larger than the Milky Way. The star-forming regions, which are pinkish, are found in the winding dust lanes along the disk of the galaxy. A boxy halo shows faint, narrow structures that could represent the mixed and spread-out debris from a satellite galaxy that this larger spiral disrupted.

Image Credit & Copyright: Processing - Robert Gendler, Roberto Colombari
Data - European Southern Observatory, Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), et al.

Messier 77 (NGC 1068) is a face-on spiral galaxy some 47 million light years away in the constellation Cetus. It's about 100 thousand light-years across.

It's classified as a Seyfert galaxy because it's an active galaxy with a compact, very bright core. The activity is due to a supermassive black hole.

Hubble data were used to make this image which shows "winding spiral arms traced by obscuring dust clouds and red-tinted star forming regions close in to the galaxy's luminous core."

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, André van der Hoeven

I wandered lonely as a cloud? No, not a cloud, it's a dwarf galaxy called Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM) after the three astronomers that discovered it. It's a member of our local galaxy group, but at 3 million light years from the Milky Way, it's a remote member.WLM is about 8000 light years across and we can see star forming regions (pink), hot young stars (blue) and older cooler stars (yellow).

Image Credit: ESO, VST/Omegacam Local Group Survey