NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this image featuring several galaxies. The lone galaxy in the upper right is LEDA 58109. In the image, it is accompanied by two other galactic objects in the lower left. One is an active galactic nucleus called SDSS J162558.14+435746.4, which is partially obscuring the galaxy SDSS J162557.25+435743.5 which is partially visible to the right behind the active galactic nucleus.
Galaxies are often classified into two categories: spiral and elliptical. But just the diversity of this Hubble image shows how there is a much more complex network of galaxy classifications. This includes galaxies that have extremely luminous active galactic nuclei within them.
The galaxies in the image also illustrate the wide variety of names these star systems have. For example, some are relatively short like LEDA 58109, while others have longer names that can be a little hard to remember like other galaxies in the image. This happens because of the different cataloging systems that map and identify the different galaxies in our sky.
But it cannot be considered an extensive catalog and sometimes they cover overlapping regions of the sky. This means that the same galaxy can belong to different catalogs and therefore can have different names. An example of this is LEDA 58109, which is its name in the LEDA galaxy database, but is also known as MCG+07-34-030 in the MCG galaxy catalog and SDSS J162551.50+435747.5 in the SDSS catalog . The SDSS catalog also lists the two galaxies to its right.
LEDA, which stands for Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA) was a galaxy database that was first created in 1983 at the Lyon Observatory. MCG stands for the Morphological Catalog of Galaxies (or Morfologiceskij Katalog Galaktik in Russian). The Russian was published in five parts between 1962 and 1974. SDSS stands for Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is a catalog created using multispectral imaging and redshift spectroscopic data from a dedicated 2.5-meter wide-angle optical telescope.