Hopefully you can see why this sky item is called Hamburger Galaxy. It has not been noticed by Messier in his famous catalog of faint fuzzies. Messier was comet hunter and was frustrated by object which resembled but were not comets. So he created a list of over 100 objects of that kind in 1771, but missed this nice galaxy. Hamburger Galaxy (NGC3628) has been eventually discovered by William Hershel in 1784.
It is about 35 million light years away and can be found in constellation of Leo. Along with M65 and M66 galaxies forms famous Leo Triplet.
NGC3628 is an unbarred spiral galaxy, although its spiral structure is not easily seen. The most obvious structure of Hamburger Galaxy is broad and obscuring band of dust located along the outer edge if its spiral arms. This band effectively cut the galaxy to our view. Distorted galaxy shape suggests that it is interacting with other galaxies of the Leo Triplet.
The photography above has been taken with standard setup. Luminance was exposed in 180 minutes total time. Each of RGB channels exposures were made for 30 minutes with pixel binning set to 2×2.
The photography below presents luminance only.
