Not so often photographed Galaxy with faint, but large, companions.
They are located on the top and the left and near the border of the image.
Wikipedia:
While usually considered an
unbarred spiral galaxy, recent research suggests it may in fact be a
barred spiral galaxy; its bar is hard to see due to its high inclination. Further support for the presence of a bar stems from the X-shaped structure seen near its centre, which is thought to be associated with a buckling instability of a stellar bar.It is also both smaller and less luminous than the
Milky Way with very little
neutral hydrogen or
molecular hydrogen and a low luminosity in the
infrared, which suggests a currently low rate of
star formation.NGC 2683 is rich in
globular clusters, hosting about 300 of them, twice the number found in the Milky Way. Due to its vast distance and complexity (due to the association of globular clusters bound to it), NGC 2638's mass has not been calculated as accurately as it could be. Otherwise its volume and vector motions are reasonably well known and characterized.Several satellite galaxies are known in the vicinity of NGC 2683. The largest is KK 69, with a Holmberg diameter of 12,000 light-years (3.7 kiloparsecs). It is a dwarf transitional galaxy, with properties intermediate between those of
dwarf irregular galaxies and
dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Another is KK 70, which is about half the diameter of KK 69. Two additional dwarf galaxies are assumed to be satellites: they are N2683dw1 and N2683dw2, which are dwarf irregular and dwarf spheroidal galaxies, respectively.
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