NGC 2841 — Galaxy in Ursa Major

NGC 2841 is the prototype of the flocculent spiral class — a galaxy in Ursa Major about 46 million light-years away whose spiral structure is composed of countless short, patchy fragments of arms rather than a single grand design. Its tightly wound, overall smooth appearance, threaded with delicate dust lanes and no dominant arm, has made it a textbook example in galaxy classification. The galaxy is large and luminous (similar to or larger than the Milky Way), with a prominent bright nucleus and a relatively quiescent disk. At magnitude 9.3 it is one of the finest galaxy targets in Ursa Major.

A satisfying telescope object. A 4-inch at moderate power shows a small, bright nucleus surrounded by an elongated halo. An 8-inch at 150-200x reveals the disk's inclination clearly, with a sharp central condensation and hints of the dust lane silhouetted against the bright bulge. A 12-inch begins to mottle the disk and bring out the flocculent texture, but no obvious arms ever emerge — that smoothness is the point. Star-hop from Theta Ursae Majoris about 1.8 degrees southwest. Best observed February through May.

Discovered by William Herschel on 9 March 1788. NGC 2841 has been a key reference object in the long debate over how spiral arms form — its lack of a strong density-wave pattern motivated theoretical work on stochastic, self-propagating star formation as an alternative arm-generating mechanism in the 1970s.