I ran 1h 14m on NGC 4565, the Needle galaxy C38, mostly as a check before committing real time to my hunt for the Squid Nebula. The Needle galaxy is the kind of object that rewards even a short session: the dust lane resolves on its own at this exposure length, no real coaxing needed.
NGC 4565 sits almost perfectly edge-on from Earth, in Coma Berenices near the North Galactic Pole. That orientation is most of why it looks the way it does. A galaxy seen face-on shows its arms. A galaxy seen edge-on shows the thing underneath: the dust layer running through the disk’s midplane, the bulge shape, how thick the whole structure actually is. NGC 4565 happens to line up almost dead-on with our line of sight, so we get a clean cross-section instead of a hint of one.
Size-wise this is not a small galaxy. Around 100,000 light years across, somewhere near 200 billion solar masses, roughly 240 globular clusters, all of which lands close to or slightly past the Milky Way’s own numbers. Spitzer infrared data found a central bar and an inner ring hiding under the visible bulge, which is also believed to be true of our own galaxy. The comparison gets used a lot for a reason.
The nucleus isn’t doing nothing, either. X-ray data picked up two separate sources near the core. One sits right at the center and matches what a low luminosity active galactic nucleus looks like: a supermassive black hole pulling in material slowly, producing X-rays as a side effect rather than a dramatic flare. The second source has nothing to do with the black hole at all. It traces back to a faint globular cluster sitting out near the edge of the bulge. Two bright spots, same region of the image, two unrelated causes.
There’s also a warp. A LOFAR study at low radio frequency found a bend in NGC 4565’s radio halo that lines up with a warp already known from neutral hydrogen mapping. The galaxy is otherwise quiet, lower star formation than you’d expect for its size, so the warp stands out. Because it doesn’t show up at higher radio frequencies, the researchers put its minimum age around 100 million years. Warps like this usually trace back to a gravitational tug from something nearby.
Something nearby is exactly what shows up at the bottom of this frame. A faint smudge just south of the main disk is NGC 4562, magnitude 14, first picked up by Tempel back in 1882. NGC 4565, NGC 4562, and two IC-catalog galaxies in the same patch of sky are grouped together as Holm 426, a 1937 catalog entry for double and multiple systems. Whether NGC 4562 is actually the source of the warp is unresolved. Some distance estimates put it slightly farther out than NGC 4565, which cuts against a strong tidal pull, even with the two likely bound together.
Run Card
| Object | NGC 4565 (Needle Galaxy, Caldwell 38) |
| Telescope | DwarfLab DWARF 3, 35mm aperture |
| Mode | EQ mode |
| Filter | Astro filter |
| Sub exposure | 60 seconds |
| Gain | 50 |
| Frame count | 74 |
| Total integration | 1h 14m |
| Sky | Bortle 6 |
| Stack | Stellar Studio (auto) |
| Finishing | Snapseed |
Frequently Asked Questions
How far away is the Needle Galaxy?
NGC 4565 is somewhere between 30 and 50 million light years away in Coma Berenices, near the North Galactic Pole. Estimates vary by study; one commonly cited figure is about 38.8 million light years.
Why does the Needle Galaxy look like a thin line?
It’s a spiral galaxy seen almost exactly edge-on. A dust lane runs along the disk’s midplane and splits the bright bulge, which produces the needle shape.
Does the Needle Galaxy have a black hole?
Yes. X-ray data from the nucleus matches a low luminosity active galactic nucleus, meaning a supermassive black hole slowly accreting material. A second nearby X-ray source is unrelated and comes from a globular cluster instead.
What is the small galaxy near NGC 4565?
NGC 4562, at roughly magnitude 14. It sits close to NGC 4565 in the sky, and both galaxies are grouped with two IC-catalog objects under the 1937 Holm 426 catalog entry.
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