This rarely imaged edge-on, warped spiral galaxy is located 150 million light years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici at a declination of +38 degrees. It is a magnitude 13.6 galaxy which spans 4 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a large diameter of 160,000 light years.
The smaller background galaxy is UGC 8919.
The big question here is whether these 2 galaxies are interacting. The distance information varies and is not definitive on whether these 2 are the same distance away. Both galaxies show some signs of distrubance – NGC 5403 has a warped disk and UGC 8919 has slightly curving star stream plumes. My guess is that they are interacting, but that may be simply because I like to think of galaxy pairs as interacting (even though most adjacent pairs are not).
Regardless, the dust lane of NGC 5403 is fantastically detailed and is nicely silhouetted against the bright but bulgeless core. My collection of edge-on galaxy dust bands is
here.
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