The irregular galaxy NGC 1427A

Colour composite image of NGC 1427A, based on observations collected with FORS1 in Service mode for Andreas Reisenegger and his colleagues in November 2002 and January 2003. A very tenuous galaxy is also visible in the upper right corner. For the blue, green and red channels the U, V and H-alpha filters were used, respectively. North is on the left and West is up. The entire field of view of this image is ~ 6.7 x 6.7 arcmin which corresponds to ~ 120 x 120 thousand light-years at the Fornax Cluster distance. Henri Boffin (ESO) did the final processing of the image.