This beautiful edge-on galaxy, nicknamed the Needle Galaxy and also known as Caldwell 38, is located 40 million light years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices at a declination of +26 degrees. It is a magnitude 12.4 galaxy which spans 15 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a large diameter of 170,000 light years.
This galaxy is close enough and large enough to provide a nice view of the edge-on dust lanes. The near edge of the galaxy is unobscured and located at the bottom. Often these type of dust lanes just seem to be 2 dimensional with no depth, but here we can clearly see the various dust bands at difference distances from the core. Several parts of the dust lane can be seen extending upwards, a bit out of the plane of the disk. The color changes from yellow near the core to blue in the outer edges. Several bright blue star clouds can also be seen within the disk.
The glow from the core extends in a halo above and below the disk. This glow is peanut-shaped, as many are as shown in my
Peanut Shaped Core Collection.
The disk is disturbed a bit. The left and right edges are slightly warped, and the core is offset slightly to the right. I do not see anything which is causing this disturbance.
The small faint blue galaxy to the lower left is IC 3573, a dwarf galaxy 60 million light years away and only 10,000 light years in diameter.
Numerous tiny distant galaxies are seen below and to the right of the galaxy. I could not find distance information for them. If they are Milky Way sized, they are between 2 and 3 billion light years away.
My usual Hubble comparison is not as interesting as usual for this object, so I relegated it to Revision I and did not use it as a mouseover view.
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