NGC 2336 was discovered more than a century ago, but the large, blue spiral galaxy has never looked better, thanks to a striking image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel discovered NGC 2336 in 1876, which he did with a humble 11 inch (0.28 meter) telescope. He could hardly have imagined a picture like this, taken by Hubble’s 2.4 – meter main mirror, according to to a press release from NASA.
NGC 2336 is about 100 million light years away and located in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (depicting a giraffe). With its eight prominent spiral arms, NGC 2336 measures approximately 200 light-years dwars. In contrast, the Milky Way – another spiral system – is about half the size and measures 105,000 light-years in diameter.
The giant galaxy is filled with young stars that appear in blue, while older stars, many toward the center, shine in red.
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Interestingly, NGC 2336 produced a visible supernova that astronomers detected on August 16, 1987. It was later determined to be a type 1a supernova, in which the exploding member of a binary pair is a white dwarf.