Vorontsov-Vel'yaminov published The Atlas and Catalogue of
Interacting Galaxies in 1959. A compilation of interacting
galaxies found in the Palomar Sky Survey and the Crimean Station of
the Institute, The Atlas... was a record of fragmenting
galaxies according to Vorontsov-Vel'yaminov, a theory proposed by
Ambartsumyan in 1958.
Inspired by both Zwicky's sketches and faint images of peculiar and
distorted galaxies, such as those of Vorontsov Velyaminov, Halton Arp
spent four years photographing many such objects with the Palomar 200
inch. He believed that "the peculiarities...represent perturbations,
deformations and interactions which should enable us to analyze the
nature of real galaxies which we observe and which are too remote to
experiment on directly". In 1966, he published his
Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, containing high resolution images of 338
systems .