The Most Peculiar Galaxies That You Can Observe

Forty years ago, I penned my first of many articles for Astronomy. It ran in the February 1981 issue as "Observing Peculiar Galaxies."

The term peculiar galaxies refers to a class of galaxies whose distorted shapes resemble neither classical spiral galaxies nor amorphous elliptical galaxies — and at the time, they were still mysterious. Just 16 years earlier, Halton Arp had published his Atlas of...