The Spindle Galaxy is a small galaxy which is a less frequently photographed target. As can be seen from this work, the galaxy is a clearly outlined, uniquely shaped edge-on spiral galaxy. It is located in the constellation Draco, approximately 50 million light years away from us. One prominent feature of the Spindle Galaxy is its dust disk, which extends almost edge-on from the plane of the galaxy as viewed from Earth. It looks like a spinning disc. Along the long axis of the galaxy, we can see noticeable dust lanes, which appear deep brown under the illumination of starlight. These dust lanes play a key role in the structure of this galaxy, as they facilitate the formation of new stars.
Most people believe that the Spindle Galaxy is the 102nd object in the Messier Catalog (M 102), but there are controversial views that M 102 is actually a duplication of M 101.
Also observable in this work are the densely packed dark red to golden galaxies in the background of this celestial area. They are all very distant, most of them are billions of light years away.
Rev. B is the annotated image using a custom catalog in PixInsight. The catalog is the complete PGC catalog I extracted from HyperLeda (
https://leda.univ-lyon1.fr), and I added magnitude and distance information to the annotation source using my own Python script. As can be seen, many of the background galaxies are billions and even 10 billions of light years away.
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