Another excellent discovery, Stu.
The arms in this galaxy are very fine, and the knots look small.
It does not look like the sort of galaxy that has a lot of surviving supergiant stars.
Could this be a type 1a (
non- core collapse) object?
The old photograph of this galaxy (chemical process) in the Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies is excellent:
Here is another goodish image, this time a composite of blue and red DSS images that I downloaded from the Aladin version of DSS:
If you go to //hla.stsci.edu, and look up the HST images of this galaxy, you can find a nice image of an unusual dust lane bisecting the bulge; this lane looks like it could be a polar feature.
cheers,
Robert
P.S.
I seem to recall once discussing with Mr Marples that, while (on the whole) the core-collapse events are more common, certain very massive galaxies
without much current star-formation do seem to have
plenty of type 1a events.