NGC 1357 — a mature spiral coiled around a golden heart, its young star clusters strung along tightly wound arms some 89.5 million light-years away
NGC 1357 is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus, classified SA(s)ab — an early-type spiral with a large central bulge and arms that wind outward from the bulge with neither a bar nor an inner ring
At a distance of about 89.5 million light-years it spans roughly 2.8 arcminutes on the sky, corresponding to a diameter of about 73,000 light-years, and shines at visual magnitude 11.5
The smooth, warm-toned bulge is encircled by tightly wound inner arms traced by blue clusters of young stars and small pink knots of ionized hydrogen where new stars are forming; beyond them a broad, flocculent disk of short arm fragments and fine dust lanes fades gradually into a faint outer glow of older starlight, while a scattering of faint galaxies dots the surrounding field, among them a slender blue edge-on spiral to the upper right and a small ringed spiral in the lower left corner
NGC 1357 is counted among the outlying members of the NGC 1407 group within the larger Eridanus cloud of galaxies, its recession velocity of about 2,000 km/s and its distance matching those of the group, yet it sits far enough from its neighbors to have evolved largely undisturbed
Early-type spirals like this one converted much of their gas into stars long ago, so today their star formation lingers mainly in the inner arms where the remaining gas has gathered — a portrait of a spiral galaxy settling quietly into middle age
Imaged in LRGB, OTA ASA AZ 1500, Camera Moravian C5A 150M, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby