NGC 2336 was discovered over a hundred years ago, but the giant blue spinning galaxy never looked better, thanks to an attractive image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The German astronaut Wilhelm Tempel discovered NGC 2336 in 1876, which he made with an 11-inch (0.28 meter) humble telescope. He could barely take such a photograph, taken with the 7.9-foot (2.4 meter) Hubble main mirror, according to to NASA press release.
NGC 2336 is about 100 million light-years away and located in the northern constellation Camelopardalis (which features a giraffe). With all eight spiral arms visible, the NGC 2336 measures approximately 200,000 light years across. In comparison, the Milky way – another spinning galaxy – is about half that size, measuring 105,000 light-years in diameter.
The gigantic galaxy is filled with young stars, which appear in blue, while older stars, many of which are oriented toward the center, shine in red.
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Interestingly, NGC 2336 released a visible supernova, discovered by astronauts on August 16, 1987. It was later determined to be a type 1a supernova, in which the explosive ball of a binary pair is white dwarf.