A classic beautiful grand spiral with a very short bar going through its nucleus. Its 100 million light years away from us with a diameter of around 118,000 light years, about the same the same size as our own Milky Way. As projected on our sky, its only about 3.5 x 4 arc minutes in size. An amazing number of pink, red and blue star forming regions are closely spaced along each arm. Its hard to count the arms as the two main arms seem to split more than once along their lengths and even split and rejoin one another. You can also clearly see a rich seam of dust along the center of each arm, much like in M51, along with many fainter spiral streaks of dust throughout the galaxy's disk.

I was going to crop this down further, but noticed all the nice distant galaxy clusters in the field, and decided not to crop it down too much. Most of the galaxy clusters are anonymous, with no catalog number that I could easily find. I would guess that almost all of them are well over a billion light years away.

At the far right center, you can see an intensely blue star that has a color index of about -0.14 (B-V mangitude). This turns out to be a white dwarf, PG 1353+409, with a white dwarf spectral class of DA2.1. This dead star still glowing like a blue hot ember with an effective surface temperature of 24,000 degrees (Teff = 50400/2.1) and is about 445 light years from us (3.26 light years per parcsec / 0.0073227 arc second parallax).

There are over a dozen quasars in the image as well, with the brightest being PB 988, which is the small pale blue star closest to the galaxy below and to its right. Despite being fairly bright at 18.5 magnitude (Visual), this quasar has a redshift of z=1.59521 putting its distance at around 10.4 billion light years. Most of the rest of the quasars in the image are quite a bit fainter, ranging from 20th to around 21st magnitude.

The designation for this galaxy is a little confusing as it appears to have duplicate entries in the NGC catalog, one as NGC 5371 and one as NGC 5390!

Each of the 9 eight minute images that were stacked to create this image were themselves 240 two second exposures live-stacked in SharpCap.