A Nice Galaxy in Lepus

Good afternoon all,

I had to push myself last night to grab an observation through a clear sky window. Family taxi duties, followed by a music practice session at a friend’s house saw me return home under a cold clear sky with a frost already forming. I had intended to be in bed early as I had to be up at 5am for work, but! I couldn’t pass by a chance to grab a sketch before the moon rose could I?

I had nothing planned, so I looked through the Arp catalogue for something new in the vicinity of Orion, there were a few Arp’s that I hadn’t got but they lacked any wow factor so I looked to Herschel’s NGC observations, noting that NGC 1954 looked both attractive and a little different, this lay in Lepus beneath the giants feet. I star hoped to this mag 11.8, 4.2’ x 2.0’ spiral, it appeared rather faint on the monitor, I adjusted the monitor controls to maximise the contrast and the remote camera controls, I then went out into the observatory and lowered the southern observing flap, as this was cutting the 500mm aperture down by around 50%. This improved things but it was by no means bright all considerable detail was displayed. I drew in the main field stars and when I came to work on NGC 1954 itself I turned all the lighting off to elevate the contrast still further in an endeavour to pick out all the structure that I could. A smaller companion galaxy NGC 1957 which appears as an extended amorphous fuzz to the upper left in my sketch is a more distant mag 14 spiral.

Once my sketch was completed I was quite pleased after my initial disappointment at the targets lack of ‘star’ quality. Taking my SQM reading of the observation area, low in the south towards London showed as just 19, compared with 20 overhead, however the Moon was now above the horizon to the east.

In all a worthwhile observation, which had taken an hour and resulted in a reasonable sketch of an interesting and new galaxy for me.

Clear Skies to you, Dale

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