This object is a spiral galaxy located 25 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major at a declination of +57 degrees. This magnitude 11 galaxy spans 5 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 35,000 light years.
A faint arm structure is visible but is not well defined. Many bluish star cloud areas are visible in the disk. The core is also poorly defined but seems like it could have aspects of a bar structure. Like many galaxies I have imaged in this size diameter of 25,000 to 50,000 light years, the structure here seems to have aspects of both an irregular and a spiral galaxy. I have now created an Astrobin collection of these irregular/spiral galaxies
here.
The Hubble image in the mouseover has good definition of star clouds and dust lanes. But yet again I am perplexed by the bright cyan star color of constant tone and brightness which seems to permeate so many of these Hubble images. It doesn’t look natural to my eye, but perhaps their main goal is to show off the star structure in these galaxies.
Some sources report this galaxy as a satellite to M101, but at over 3 degrees and 2 million light years away from M101, I question whether it is a true satellite of it.
The distant galaxies at upper left appear to belong to a galaxy cluster about 2 billion light years away.
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