NGC 3184 is a spiral galaxy approximately 40 million light years away from us in the constellation Ursa Major. It encompasses two HII regions respectively called NGC 3180 and NGC 3181. Apparent size is about 7'x7' including the faint extensions. Not the best target for a 580 mm focal length but I could not resist to give it a try for a wide field. Note that East is up in this picture.

Here are some remarkable hints about the objects exhibited in the picture extracted from free sources:

In 2010 NGC 3184 was the theatre of a strange outburst, SN 2010dn, also classified as a supernova impostor, a funny name, you might get a look here for a brief description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_impostor . The bright red star below NGC3184 is V* GP Uma, a so-called Long-Period Variable Candidate about 309 pc away, that makes about 1000 lys for an apparent magnitude of 8.1. This immediately tells us that it cannot be a little red star but must be red giant or supergiant. Long period variables are pulsating cool giant, or supergiant, variable stars with periods from around a hundred days, to more than a thousand days. Most LPVs are thermally-pulsing asymptotic giant branch stars with luminosities several thousand times the sun.

Left to NGC 3184 you find a tiny galaxy named NGC 3179 about 355 Mly from us (z redshift of 0.022385).

If you have a well calibrated screen you can identify a discern a very weak fuzzy spot near to NGC 3179 at 1h clock position. It is named [HKK2009] dJ1018+4109, a so-called low surface brightness galaxy (or LSB). A very nice introduction to LSBs can be found here (quite old article but good historical overview): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/133941

Finally the tiny galaxies in the upper left part of the picture are part of the Abell 971 cluster, z = 0.093 which corresponds to a distance of about 1.3 billions lys…

Processing was a bit complicated, unfortunately I had to keep the background quite black, it lacks a bit of depth, nevertheless it is quite nice to get all these objects with 3.5h exposure in a 4 inch refractor…

The universe is always amazing, isn't it ?