Astrophoto Friday - The UFO Galaxy

As of their last web update the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) has so far discovered 752 supernovae. The heart of the PTF survey is Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope - a wide-field Schmidt camera. It operates in robotic mode, taking a new image of the night sky every 90 seconds.

Most of the time the images are optimized to hunt for supernovae and are not cleaned up to make them visually appealing. Thankfully some of the PTF team has taken the time to produce some nice shots, which I will be sharing here from time to time. Our first one is of a galaxy known as NGC 2683.


NGC 2683 is a nearly edge-on spiral galaxy located some 16 million light years away in the direction of constellation Lynx. NGC 2683 is nicknamed the UFO Galaxy.