This object is a face-on grand spiral galaxy located 130 million light years away in the constellation of Leo at a declination of +10 degrees. This galaxy spans 3.5 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to an actual diameter of 130,000 light years.
It is too bad that this beautiful galaxy isn’t closer to us. Two graceful distinct arms spiral out from the core. It is a bit hard to follow their path, but they appear to wrap around at least 360 degrees. Faint
Vorontsov-Velyaminov rows are visible towards the end of each arm. The arms appear somewhat disturbed, but I couldn’t find any companions who could be causing it.
As beautiful as this galaxy is, it is almost outdone by the interesting linear pattern of galaxies in the background, all slightly less than ½ billion light years away. The color and shape of each galaxy is slightly different, which adds to the beauty of the composition.
Two distant galaxy clusters are visible in the bottom right and upper left corners. I couldn’t find distance information for them, but they are likely at least 2 billion light years away.
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