The galaxy NGC 3621

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy located 22 Mly away in the constellation of Hydra. It is very bright and can be well seen in moderate-sized telescopes. The galaxy is around 93,000 ly across and is at an angle of 25° from being viewed edge on.

It shines with a luminosity equal to 13 billion times that of the our Sun. This galaxy has an active nucleus that matches a Seyfert 2 optical spectrum, suggesting that a low mass supermassive black hole is present at the core. Based upon the motion of stars in the nucleus, this object may have a mass of up to three million times the mass of the Sun.

NGC 3621 is a prominent and very detailed spiral galaxy in Centaurus. The distance is around 21.7 million light years.

This image was taken with a 36.8 cm (14.5") Ritchey Chretien telescope working at F9 and a SBIG STXL16200 CCD camera.

It is a LRGB exposure with Luminance = 100 minutes, Red = Green = 120 minutes and Blue = 150 minutes. All exposures were unbinned. Processing was done in MaximDL, Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop.

Copyright: Steve Crouch