NGC 1365 - The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy

Located in the Fornax Constellation about 56 million light years away, NGC 1365 is one of the largest spiral galaxies known—twice as large as our own Milky Way Galaxy. The quintessential example of a barred spiral galaxy, NGC 1365 contains billions of old stars near its center occupying a relatively straight bar formation through its core, which contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of roughly two million suns (half the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way).

NGC 1365 is part of the Fornax Galaxy Cluster—one of the closest galaxy clusters to our own Local Group of galaxies—which contains roughly sixty galaxies held together by gravity.

This is another archival image of mine restored through reprocessing. I originally took this at Big Bend in November 2020 on my first-ever dark-sky trip. While it’s too far south for my telescopes in Santa Fe, it’s certainly one I will revisit when I have my rigs in Chile up and running.