NGC 5364 - Grand Design Spiral Galaxy in Virgo

NGC 5364 is a “grand-design” spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo, located roughly 54-60 million light-years from Earth. Its formal morphological class is SA(rs)bc pec - a non-barred spiral with an incomplete inner ring (rs) and loosely wound arms that display asymmetry and peculiar features, likely influenced by gravitational interactions with its neighbor, NGC 5363. The galaxy is a member of the NGC 5364 group (LGG 362), which in turn is part of the Virgo III filament extending outward from the main Virgo Cluster. Many of the group’s spiral galaxies show signs of disturbed H I and Hα morphologies, possibly due to environmental effects like ram-pressure stripping or tidal interaction within the filament.

This image was captured using the CHI-1-CCD system at Telescope Live (Planewave CDK24 in Chile). The dataset was particularly challenging:

- Nearly all subframes were affected by major satellite trails, a likely consequence of this field’s location near paths crossed by geostationary satellites.

- I used selective rejection technique that resulted in clean master files - initially I used SetiAstro’s blemish blaster in satellite trails removal mode but this did not yield better results than just using clone stamp tool to paint over the trails.

- Once I had clean set of data the processing was rather straightforward.

Sources:

wikipedia.org

noirlab.edu

esahubble.org

Data credit: Telescope.Live