Coddington’s Nebula, also known as IC 2574, is a dwarf spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. It was discovered by Coddington in 1898 and at the time, we didn’t know that galaxies were a thing (a debate that would not be settled until Hubble came along a few decades later). Even then, it doesn’t much look like a normal spiral galaxy and visually I’m sure it was just a gray smudge in the eyepiece.

The galaxy is about 12.8 million light years away and is part of the M81 galaxy group. Astronomers think that 90% of its mass is dark matter. We can see several star forming nebulae in the galaxy and the overall blue color of the galaxy indicates a lot of hot, young blue stars have been formed recently.

This is 55h 15m of HaLRGB data. If you want the technical processing details, see astrobin.