The outskirts of this galaxy barely rise above the light pollution in my backyard even with 80 minutes of integration time, so it's not much to look at as a pretty picture. It would show up much brighter and be quite pretty from a dark sky site someday though! However, I think the story of what's in the image is pretty interesting, so I thought I would upload it.

My interest in this galaxy when I came across it one evening was its barred spiral and unusually large size for a galaxy in Auriga. Within a 5 degree radius around this galaxy, this region of the sky contains nothing coming anywhere near this objects roughly 2.5 arc minute diameter (as I measured it in this image). The redshift available for this galaxy is z = 0.02004, putting it at roughly 277 million light years away. At this distance, the true diameter of this galaxy around 200,000 light years, making it almost twice as large our own Milky Way. Despite its large size, UGC 3374 is still about the same total brightness as is estimated for our own Milk Way galaxy.

The galaxy looks to have a couple of satellite galaxies at least, one dwarf spheroidal at the end of the arm to the upper right of the galaxy and a fainter diffuse low surface brightness galaxy just slightly further out in the same direction. Other than that, there are no other galaxies that closer than 25 million light years away from this lonely object other than possibly galaxy LEDA/PGC 2284491 at the far upper left edge of the image. There is no distance data on this object, but it may still be quite a bit more distant even though its fairly bright. So it seems UGC 3374 is in a mostly empty galaxy void at least 50 million light years across.

One last unusual feature of this galaxy is the bright stellar core. This is clearly an active galactic nucleus galaxy (AGN) listed in the SIMBAD database as a Seyfert Type I AGN. We are looking down into the beam of emission from the region around this galaxy's central black hole's accretion disk. The entire galaxy is 14.62 magnitude (V filter, presumably minus the flux from the core) and the core alone is 14.008 magnitude (V), making the core 1.7 times brighter than the entire galaxy in visible light! I am glad it is very far away from us.

Each of the ten 8 minute subs was a live-stack of 320 x 1.5 second exposures. Live stacking was performed with SharpCap.