Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841

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About this Image

The fainter galaxy NGC2841 is one of the early recognized spiral galaxies, first discovered by William Herschel in 1788.
It has been classified as of Hubble type SA(r)b galaxy. The western part is partly obscured by the galaxy's halo, reducing the contrast in this area. It is showing a similar appearance as the wellknown galaxy M 63.

The distance to this galaxy has been determined recently at 47 million light years. The appearance resembles symmetrical spiral arms showing up as with dark dust areas and blue star forming areas, brightening slowly from outward and then rapidly to the nuclear region. Several supernovae have been reported in this galaxy.

The rapid outflows of gas from giant stars, and supernova explosions in the disk of a galaxy create huge shells or bubbles of hot gas that expand rapidly and rise above the disk like plumes of smoke from a chimney, shown in a X-ray image from Chandra.
There seems to be a faint tidal stream out from the north-west of the galaxy.
North is up;

Find a close-up of the galaxy in 40/80% size below.

Literature:
Infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope: 1.
X-Ray image from the Chandra Space Telescope: 2.
Global structure and kinematics of the Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841: 3.
Fabry-Perot imaging spectroscopy of the Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841: 4.
The discovery of Cepheids and a new distance to NGC 2841 using the HST: 5.

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Technical Details

Optics

16" cassegrain in secondary focus at f/10

Mount MK-100 GEM
Camera SBIG STL-11000M at -30C, internal filter wheel,
Filters Astronomik LRGB
Date Feb 08-13, 2008.
Location Wildon/Austria
Sky Conditions mag 5.5 sky, FWHM 1.5-2.0" temperature 0 C
Exposure L:R:G:B = 500:160:120:160 minutes (20-minute sub-exposures).
Processing Image aquisition in Maxim DL 4.56, Preprocessing and deconvolution in CCDStack;
Fitsliberator; Wavelet filter; Curves, high pass filter, unsharp mask, color balance in Photoshop;