A hamburger with a tail

A long, tilted galaxy sits in the center of the frame, a glowing pale-yellow band crossed lengthwise by a dark, rusty-red streak, with a hazy bluish-white glow flaring at both ends. A very faint gray trail stretches from its right end down toward the lower-right corner. Hundreds of small white, gold, and orange stars and tiny distant galaxies fill the black background, with one bright blue star near the top.

Dave Doctor from Las Cruces, New Mexico

The Hamburger Galaxy (NGC 3628) is an edge-on spiral in Leo, some 30 million light-years away, and a member of the Leo Triplet along with M65 and M66. Tidal interactions with those neighbors has extracted a faint tidal tail about 300,000 light-years long, part of which trails off at lower right. The imager took 40 hours of exposure in LRGB filters with a 14-inch f/3.8 astrograph.