NGC 7184 – A Ringed Bar Tilted Toward the Line of Sight
NGC 7184 is a barred spiral galaxy of type SB(r)c in the constellation Aquarius, its disk inclined by roughly 70 degrees so that the inner ring and bar are foreshortened into a bright oval core while the outer arms remain clearly traceable
The redshift independent mean distance from NED is 30.46 Mpc, about 99 million light years, and at that distance the galaxy’s 8.2 arcminute extent corresponds to a diameter of roughly 236,000 light years, more than twice the size of the Milky Way, with a visual magnitude of about 11.2
The steep tilt is what gives this galaxy its character, the near side of the disk lays its dust lanes across the bulge in a dense brown web while the far side shows the spiral arms opening outward in blue, dotted with the pink of hydrogen emission from star forming regions, and beyond the bright disk a faint outer envelope extends well past the visible arms, particularly toward the northeast where an isolated HII region has been found on the major axis, possibly the remnant of a spiral arm reaching out into the halo
NGC 7184 hosts a low luminosity active galactic nucleus, a supermassive black hole feeding at a slow rate, and in 1984 it produced supernova SN 1984N, discovered visually by Robert Evans in Australia
The field is rich in background galaxies at far greater distances, an edge on spiral at the top, a face on spiral pair at the bottom and a scattering of smaller systems, none of them physically associated with NGC 7184
Imaged in LRGB and Ha on the ASA Astrosysteme AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby