NGC 3628 “Culver’s in the sky”

NGC 3628 is classed as an unbarred spiral galaxy 35 million light years away in Leo. It’s often referred to as the hamburger galaxy. I have to say if I’m going to eat a burger from fast food place it will be Culver’s! And this one looks delicious, must be a bacon butter deluxe.

It’s also one of the galaxies in the Leo triplet and has a tidal tail that stretches 300,000 light years seen in a nice detail in this image. While classified as unbarred, there is some speculation that it is a barred galaxy due to the X shaped bulge in the central portion. Bar formation is often triggered by interaction with other galaxies, and 3628 is interacting with the other two galaxies in the triplet.

The galaxy features numerous dust lanes and several obvious regions of active star formation. There are many distant background galaxies throughout the image.

Image Processing and Calibration: Mark Hanson

Data: Martin Pugh

Enjoy,

Mark

 NGC 3628 Mosaic with Tail

NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy or Sarah's Galaxy, is an unbarred spiral galaxy about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. It has an approximately 300,000 light-years long tidal tail. Along with M65 and M66, NGC 3628 forms the Leo Triplet, a small group of galaxies. Its most conspicuous feature is the broad and obscuring band of dust located along the outer edge of its spiral arms, effectively transecting the galaxy to the view from Earth.

Amateur small equipment has demonstrated to be competitive tools to obtain ultra-deep imaging of the outskirts of nearby massive galaxies and to survey vast areas of the sky with unprecedented depth. Over the last decade, amateur data have revealed, in many cases for the first time, an assortment of large-scale tidal structures around nearby massive galaxies and have detected hitherto unknown low surface brightness systems in the local Universe that weren’t detected so far by means of resolved stellar populations or Hi surveys.

This has been a project from 3 different telescopes over the last 5 years.

Telescope: RCOS 14.5" F8, Apogee U16M High Cooling

Telescope: Planewave 24" f6.7 on a Planewave HD Mount Camera: SBIG 16803

Telescope: Planewave 17" f6.7 on a Planewave HD Mount Camera: SBIG 16803

Location: Stellar Winds Observatory at DSNM, Animas, New Mexico

Follow this link to see what amateurs have been doing for science