A galaxy with a crooked smile, NGC 7184
NGC 7184 glides through Aquarius, a barred spiral galaxy (SB(r)c) seen at a slanted angle that shows off both its thin disk and its inner structure. Dust lanes cut across the starlight, while the reddish glow of hydrogen-alpha in the core highlights regions of active star formation near the galaxy’s center.
Unlike a textbook spiral, NGC 7184’s arms are not perfectly balanced. One side of the disk fans outward more loosely while the other looks more compressed, giving the galaxy an asymmetric, slightly warped appearance. The arms themselves are patchy and irregular, with broken segments instead of smooth continuity—clues that this system may have experienced past gravitational disturbances.
At about 115 million light years away, NGC 7184 measures a staggering 175,000 light years across, nearly twice the diameter of the Milky Way. On the sky, it spans around 6.0 × 1.6 arcminutes, a tilted spindle set against a deep backdrop of galaxies even farther away. In the field, you’ll notice delicate face-on spirals above and thin edge-on streaks below—distant stellar metropolises scattered around this cosmic giant.
Imaged in LRGB Ha on my Planewave CDK 1000 at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image acquisition and processing: Mike Selby