First galaxy of the decade - No 237

[mdstuart]

A lovely clear night tonight so after a few doubles to warm up...including e areis 1.4" I think...Very close and only just splits using my 4mm on to the galaxy.

NGC 972 in Aries. It was not too hard to track down with a Carte du ciel map...Fairly faint, best with averted vision but very doable. Wispy to my eyes.

I have attached an image. No I have not put any blue or orange coloured stars like you lot do all the time...but at least its an attempt to show what I saw.

The faintest stars are mag 14.2.

Apparantly quite an active galaxy with lots of these H alpha areas, a redshift of 1640km/sec which I make gives 73 million light years.

The official version is .. pretty bright, pretty small, much brighter in the middle, elongated 3 X 1 in PA 145 at 165X. This galaxy really grows with averted vision....I agree.

So there you have it..galaxy 237!

Mark

[lunator]

Hi Mark very nice report

Epsilon aries is tough split. Well done on the split

Good sketch as well

Cheers Ian

[DarkerSky]

Nice one Mark