Tadpole Galaxy

I got some amazing commissions at Wiscon including this one of the Tadpole Galaxy.  I'm making it for an astronomer, Karen Knierman, and it's in her area of study.  It's an exciting image to work with and especially challenging (in a good way) becasue she is an astronomer so i need to get it very right. The only other time I've done an astronomical for an astronomer was for her husband, 10 years ago. It's an area of design that I like to work in so I've done others over the years.

The Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light years from Earth in the northern  constellation Draco. Its most dramatic feature is a massive trail of stars about 280,000 light-years long; the size of the galaxy has been attributed to a merger with a smaller galaxy that is believed to have occurred about 100 million years ago.The galaxy is filled with bright blue star clusters

It is hypothesized that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of the Tadpole Galaxy—from left to right from the perspective of Earth—and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their mutual gravitational attraction. During this close encounter, tidal forces drew out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust, forming the conspicuous tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper left. Following its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose its tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy. Photo is from the Hubble telescope.