This
Astrobin Debut Object is a spiral galaxy located 50 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major at a declination of +32 degrees. It is a magnitude 11.2 galaxy which spans 3.7 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of only 50,000 light years.
From our view perspective, the disk is inclined about 25 degrees from edge-on.
The disk appears flocculent at first glance. Looking closely, though, a rough fragmented spiral arm structure becomes apparent. Indeed, a 2000 paper concluded that this galaxy has a 2 arm grand design spiral structure clearly evident in the near-infrared view. This is an example of a decoupled galaxy, where a galaxy shows two different morphologies when viewed optically and in the near-infrared. The 2 morphologies are often comprised of two different stellar populations - a young Population I and an old Population II. I think that this can be seen in my color image, where it looks like blue spiral arms of younger stars are overlaid over a yellow flocculent disk of older stars.
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