Two "dwarf spheroidal" galaxies that are part of our local group of galaxies.
These two small galaxies show no spiral arm structure and are roughly symmetric around one axis making them spheroidal. There is a similar spheroidal bulge near the core of many galaxies, the Milky Way included, but this type of galaxy has no disk and no spiral arms.
The galaxies are near to each other in space (not just in the line of sight) and are satellite galaxies of our great neighbor Andromeda. This makes them part of our local group of galaxies, our neighbors.
NGC185 is unusual for having clusters of young stars while NGC147 seems to have had no star formation in 3 billion years or so. Thus the two galaxies must have had very different histories, in spite or similar sizes, shapes and locations in the universe. Like the Andromeda galaxy they are approximately 2.5 million light years away from us.
This graphic shows the orientation of the local group of galaxies. The Milky Way is on the lower right, while Andromeda and the Triangulum galaxies are in the upper left. NGC185 and NGC147 can be seen here as dwarf satellites near Andromeda. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is ~200,000 light years and Andromeda is 2.5 million light years from us so this is representative but not to scale.
Graphic by Andrew Z. Colvin, from the Wikipedia entry for Milky Way, licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
The image of NGC185 and NGC147 was captured at Lac Teeples on October 28, 2021 (RASA-11, ZWO ASI6200) with only 37 minutes of data.
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