NGC 3521

On February 25, 1784, it was again the German-British astronomer and musician William Herschel who discovered this galaxy in the constellation Leo. It is located at a distance of around 35 million light years and can already be found in the night sky with smaller telescopes.

NGC 3521 has an extent of around 50,000 light years and shows us its characteristic, irregular spiral arms. This galaxy is somewhat similar to ours in terms of size and appearance, with the
difference that NGC 3521 has already had an encounter of a somewhat more violent kind with another galaxy, which can still be recognized a little to the right of the image as an oval (egg-shaped) homogeneous collection of light.

In the spiral arms of NGC 3521 we find a lot of dust as well as pink-colored star-forming regions and clusters of young, blue-appearing stars.

35 million light years away … This means that the light we have captured here at
originates from a time when our Alps still resembled a young, gentle, romantic hilly landscape.

This photo of this galaxy required around 20 hours of total exposure time, divided over many individual nights and many more hours of image processing, until we were able to coax this jewel out of our night sky.

This photo was published as the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” by NASA.

Coordinates:
RA: 11h 05m 48,581s
DC: -00° 02′ 09,11″

Exposure time:
20 hours

Award:
NASA (APOD)