NGC 1325 is a barred spiral situated around 70 million light years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It is a member of the Eridanus galaxy cluster which consists of around 200 galaxies.
The galaxy has somewhat flocculent arms and a large central region with many dust lanes. The nucleus is bright and the bar is not very prominent.
At the top right of the image is NGC 1319 classified as a Lenticular galaxy it looks to me more like a spiral galaxy with well defined arms at a distance of around 182 million light years shining at magnitude 12.9
Let’s have a bit of fun.
A light year is how far light travels in one year, it is 9.46 trillion kilometers. So consider when we look at 70 million light years or 182 million light years how very far away that is.
Back here on Earth what was happening ?
70 million years ago The Earth was much warmer than it is today, with little to no ice at the poles. Sea levels were high, sometimes 170 meters higher than they are today.
Dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. New groups of mammals and birds also appeared, including the earliest relatives of placentals and marsupials.
Australia was joined to Antarctica, New Zealand, and South America, forming the last remnant of the great southern landmass called Gondwana.
180 million years ago, the Earth was in the Jurassic Period.
It was the time when the super continent of Pangaea began to break apart. Pangaea was formed by the assembly of the continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica, and Siberia. This basically incorporated North America, South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, Eurasia and Australia into one continent.
During this period there were no primates let alone humans, only Dinosaurs, other reptiles, insects, early ancestors of small mammals, Pterosaurs, and Ichthyosaurs.
The early phases of our species developed less than 2 million years ago.
Homo sapiens (thats us) developed between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.
Imaged in LRGB on my Planewave CDK 1000 at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image acquisition and processing: Mike Selby