This galaxy at 29 million lightyears, which looks like a sombrero I guess, is viewed almost edge-on. A thick rim a dust is obscuring the plane.
The Sombrero Galaxy is a bit peculiar in that it's not really a spiral galaxy, but not really an elliptical either. This can be seen in infrared images.
It has a pronounced bulge, and hundreds of globular clusters can be counted in long exposures from big telescopes.
In 1912, Vesto M. Slipher found that the Sombrero Galaxy was moving away from us so at such high speed (about 1000 km/s) that it couldn't belong to the Milky Way. This formed the basis of expanding Universe paradigm.
