Right under the back paw of the Great Bear, is this collection of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

The largest object in this image is galaxy ngc 3180 or ngc 3184, it seems to have two entries in the new general catalogue. It is situated at a distance of 40 Mly according to Wikipedia, but only about 26 Mly according to its redshift (0.00197). The galaxy is of type SAc, a spiral galaxy with active star forming regions, which I tried to enhance by collecting Ha as well as RGB. The angular size of this galaxy is only about 7 arc minutes, giving it a diameter of about 55 000 light years, half the size of the Milky Way.

Below ngc 3180 is ngc 3179, a lenticular galaxy at a distance of about 325 Mly, according to its redshift of 0.02385. Althought it is catagorised as a lens shaped galaxy, it seems to have some structure in its disc (unfortunately not visible in this image).

If you draw a line through the long axis of ngc 3179 upwards to the left, and another straight down from ngc 3180, you will find, at the intersection, a low surface brightness galaxy, [HKK2009] dJ1018+4109, which is at about the same distance as ngc 3180. In the image, the galaxy barely clears the noise floor. This galaxy is a dwarf galaxy in the local super cluster. Its diameter is about 4 400 light years.

Towards the lower left corner is galaxy cluster ACO 971, at a distance of 1.2 billion light years. This cluster contains some 37 identified member galaxies.

If you go from ngc 3180 to the left, near the edge of the image is emission line galaxy SDSS J102101.03+411946.6, at a distance of 2.55 billion light years. In contrast to "normal" galaxies, this galaxy does not emit a continuous light spectra. In stead, its spectrum is an emmision line spectrum.

Going from ngc 3179 towards the right edge, is low surface brightness galaxy MCG+07-21-035 at 23 Mly distant and with a 2 300 Ly diameter).

Finally, below MCG+07-21-035 is another galaxy cluster, [SPD2011] 2168, which is situated at a distance of approximately 3.6 billion light years.

Acquisition details:

L: 80 x 150 s

RGB: 25 x 150 s (each channel)

Ha: 45 x 300 s

Version B: added 21 Ha subs, which allowed me to push the colour more.