This weekend was bitterly cold, and I didn't want to go outside. To give myself a project to do, I wrote a Wikipedia page.
I've never actually don that before, although I signed up to Wikipedia over a decade ago to make corrections to some articles with glaring problems at the time.
Here's what I wrote (it was accepted by the editors the very next day):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_1356
Why?
I was browsing Hubble "picture of the week" and saw this beautiful galaxy with another very similar one hiding within its arms. It's a charming pair, even though they are actually 300 million LY apart! I wanted to know more, did some online searching. I soon noticed that a Wikipedia article didn't come up, although they usually do. I went looking for a wiki, and it soon became clear that this one didn't have a page. In fact, most of the
I was soon lost "down the rabbit hole" of learning how to create and edit wiki pages, formatting to their style, and poking around the SIMBAD, NED, HyperLEDA and ARP catalogs! It was a really fun way to pass the weekend while stuck indoors. Learned something about star formation, too, because it can be accelerated by gravitational tides when two closely orbiting galaxies interact. No, these two aren't, but they served as reference (control group) for spectroscopic studies of other galaxies that do. And if you look very carefully, you can see some discontinuity in the outer arm, and something has caused the left arm to develop a spur larger than itself. I wasn't able to find out what's caused that, but I suspect
I can't promise that I'll write many more interesting
Another funny thing:
The picture that got me started:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hubb ... ghborhood/
