Grand-design spirals in the core of NGC 5248

We report the detection of a bisymmetric nuclear spiral structure in the sp iral galaxy NGC 5248. The two red spiral arms can be followed for about 3 a rcsec, before they appear to end inside the radius of the circumnuclear sta rburst 'ring' at about 5.5 arcsec or 400 pc distance from the nucleus. We c ombine our near-infrared Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope adaptive optics ima ges with traditional near-infrared and optical images and show that spiral structure is present in this galaxy at spatial scales reaching from a hundr ed parsecs to 15 kpc. Comparison with a Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet image shows how the starburst ring is related to the nuclear spiral structu re. We also show a two-dimensional H-alpha velocity field that reveals no e vidence for systematic streaming motions near the nuclear spiral or the sta rburst ring, nor for a rapidly rising rotation curve.