This morning I posted a galaxy (
Arp 213) which has what appears to be a dust lane emanating from its core. I speculated that the dust feature could be a foreground Milky Way dust region, since a radial galaxy dust lane is hard to imagine from a morphological perspective. Well, here is another interesting dust lane pointing to the galaxy core, but this time the dust lane appears to truly be a part of the galaxy.
This object is a disturbed elliptical galaxy located 115 million light years away in the constellation of Camelopardalis at a declination of +77 degrees. The magnitude 11.3 galaxy spans 3 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 100,000 light years.
This interesting object looks like it could be the result of a merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy. A large faint star stream extends downward to the bottom of the image. Several interesting dust lanes are apparent in and around the core, along with faint star plumes in all directions.
Per my merger collection definitions, this galaxy seems to fall between a
M4 (merged galaxy core with 1 tail) and
M5 (merged galaxy core with no tails). Since I can faintly see a tail here, I put this object in the M4 category.
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