Follow this Link to a NASA Web site on supernovas. It has a very nice animation and a description of what these objects are.
Spiral Galaxy NGC 309:
The spiral arms in NGC 309 are narrow, well defined, and highly branched. They are a strange example of interwoven arms that are also linked together with arcs and they have many condensations. The inner ring is almost complete. The spiral structure does not cross this ring and go into the nucleus. The nucleus itself is small and amorphous.
Dreyer's description from the New General Catalog(NGC): Pretty bright, pretty large, star of magnitude 12 or 13 north.
Deep Sky Field Guide to Uranometria 2000: Small, very bright nucleus; sharp, knotty inner ring .4 x .3 arc min; many filamentary knotty bright arms.
Based on the published red shift, a rough distance estimate for NGC 309 and supernova 1999ge is: 300,000,000 light years, with the galaxy being 260,000 light years in diameter.
Click below to
George Normandin, KAS
December 12th, 1999
Revised: December 19th, 1999