Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major (Monty Chandler)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: HD89053 · NGC 3179 · NGC 3181 · NGC 3184

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Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

Link: https://montychandler.smugmug.com/Astrophotography/The-Heavans/i-HMfFZrx/A

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Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

Link: https://montychandler.smugmug.com/Astrophotography/The-Heavans/i-HMfFZrx/A

NGC 3180, also catalogued as NGC 3184, is a small, relatively faint face-on symmetrical spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major located just east of Tania Australis (μ-UMa), which is one of the hind paws of the Great Bear (using the convention of the Big Dipper's handle as the tail). It is located about 40 million light years away, north of the celestial equator at a declination of +41 degrees. The faintness of the galaxy caused me to shoot 5 minutes exposures for four nights, collecting 17.75 hours of usable data. I was counting on the big variable star GP UMa shining brightly in my image. At mag 6.5 it is a bright, but managable, yellow star.

NGC 3180 is sometimes referred to as the Little Pinwheel Galaxy. The Little Pinwheel has two prominent spiral arms that have constant pitch angles, which makes them both symmetrical. Being a face-on spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 119,000 light-years, which is roughly the same diameter as the Milky Way galaxy it somewhat resembles Messier 101, a closer and thus brighter galaxy of similar appearance. Some sources list NGC 3184 as the galaxy and refer to NGC 3180 and 3181 as HII regions of ionized hydrogen gas. Seems someone got their bits flipped somewhere, sometime.

I used an 8 inch Ritchie-Creighton design f8 telescope at 1626mm and a ZWO ASI071MC Pro astrophotography camera riding a Sky Watcher EQ6r Pro german equatorial mount to photograph this galaxy. To overcome the faintness caused by distance I used 213 300" exposures captured used Astro Photography Tool (APT) and integrated them using PixInsight 1x Drizzle Integration.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9175969
PixInsight job	BUJHZLCOYK9GX12CXHYS8MOF4GIQR2VY
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	10h18m12s.960
RA (top/left)	10h19m36s.960
RA (top/right)	10h19m33s.737
RA (bottom/right)	10h16m46s.307
RA (bottom/left)	10h16m51s.549

Dec (center)	+41°26′40″.21
Dec (top/left)	+41°02′55″.10
Dec (top/right)	+41°50′54″.24
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°50′21″.76
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°02′24″.90

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Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

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Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

Little Pinwheel Galaxy of Ursa Major

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