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Barred Spiral Galaxy M109 - Posted March 13, 2007

M109 in Ursa Major has a very prominent bar of stars running across it's center. About 66% of all spiral galaxies are considered barred spirals, but few have bars as pronounced as M109. Aside from the bright bar I find this galaxy very interesting in that it has extremely prominent spiral arms. They were very noticable even in the unprocessed raw sub-exposures displayed on my laptop screen as I was collecting the data for this shot!