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NGC1365, "The Great Barred Galaxy" in Fornax constellation,

from the Atacama desert with an amateur telescope.

© Stéphane Guisard, Los Cielos de América

& Thierry Demange, CapNature

NGC 1365, also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy,[3] is a barred spiral galaxy about 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. The core is an oval shape with an apparent size of about 50? × 40?.[4] The spiral arms extend in a wide curve north and south from the ends of the east-west bar and form an almost ring like Z-shaped halo.[4] The central mass in active galactic nucleus rotate close to relativistic limit (text from Wikipedia) The picture shown here was taken from the Atacama desert in Chile with a 50cm diameter F/8 Ritchey-Chretien telescope (Astelco) and a SBIG ST11000 CCD camera mounted on an Astelco NTM500 equatorial mount. Total exposure time is 6h50 minutes through Clear (11x10min)and Red, Green and Blue filters (10x10min each). Image acquisition and pre-processing by Stéphane, color processing by Thierry.

NGC1365, full field image.

NGC1365, higher resolution crop of the above image.