This edge-on spiral galaxy is located 60 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major at a declination of +44 degrees. It is a blue magnitude 12 galaxy which spans 5 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 90,000 light years.
Like many edge-on galaxies, this one has a beautiful dark dust lane along its centerline. Many times a peanut-shaped central bulge is seen from this perspective, but I don’t see much of that here. I like the interplay between the dust lane and the background brightness, such that the dust lane only appears as a dark band across the bulge, but at the outer edges of the galaxy there are many lighter dust areas visible. The view is obstructed a bit by a foreground Milky Way variable star, EQ J1158+4356, which lies exactly on the galaxy centerline.
The side-by-side comparison with the Hubble image in the mouseover does not reveal as much additional detail as usual.
A nice looping star stream exists on the left side of the image, but I was not able to capture it with my slow setup and my minimal number of hours. That stream is shown nicely
here.
If you like these edge-on galaxy dust bands as much as I do, check out the 50 that I currently have in my
Astrobin Edge-on Dust Band Collection.
Comments