The Needle Galaxy in Draco (NGC 5907)

Posted by Rod Pommier
on Wednesday, November 6, 2013
by Rod Pommier

Telescope/Mount: Celestron Compustar C14 with Astrophysics 0.75x focal reducer (f/8.3). SBIG AO-L adaptive optics at 8Hz :Camera: SBIG STL 11000M with Baader Planetarium L, R, G, and B filters. Location: Pommier Observatory, Portland, OR, USA.

Exposures:L:R:G:B=395:125:125:125=12 hours, 50 minutes total exposure.

NGC 5907 is a spiral galaxy in Draco. Seen nearly edge-on and almost perfectly bisected by its dust lane, it resembles NGC 4565, but with an important difference. NGC 5907 is a class Sc spiral, with a much smaller central bulge than a class Sb spiral, like NGC 4565, giving it a needle-like profile. Because of this distinctive profile, NGC 5907 is known as the Needle Galaxy or Splinter Galaxy. NGC 5907 lies approximately 50 million light-years from Earth. The small blue spiral galaxy to the lower left of NGC 5907 is KUG1513+566.

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