This seldom imaged edge-on spiral galaxy is located 55 million light years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices at a declination of +15 degrees. It is a magnitude 12 galaxy which spans 4.5 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 75,000 light years.
This is a rare true edge-on galaxy – it is hard to see any angular deviation at all from a perfect edge-on view. The mid-line dust lane is spectacular, perfectly splitting the bright background core. A bright blue star cloud is seen just below the galaxy core. The disk itself is slightly warped towards the bottom of the disk.
The glowing bulge has a distinctive X pattern, letting us know that this is a barred galaxy. My collection of X pattern bulges is
here. This pattern is also often described as peanut-shaped or Figure 8 shaped. The pattern is due to the inherent vertical instability of the unseen bar and the resulting periodic orbits of stars in the bar region. It is believed that these bulges are formed by a secular (slow) process of gas transport from the disk to the bulge area. Seen from the face-on view, these X pattern bulge galaxies appears as a
barlense galaxy instead of a simple barred galaxy.
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