NGC 3741 (2014)

If you look closely you can see the faint speckling of stars extending to the upper left and lower right of this galaxy. They are symmetrical and it’s tempting to call them spiral arms, or at least a dwarf’s best attempt at spiral arms. Astronomers have found a flat, symmetrical disk of HI (neutral atomic hydrogen) extending from this galaxy. You can’t see this disk of HI in this image but you can see the stars occupying the same space.

This galaxy was imaged as part of proposal 10915, the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey. It’s quite extensive! It took over a year just for the HST to do all the observations.

Red: HST_10915_0t_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_10915_0t_ACS_WFC_F475W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 46.1­° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.