NGC 972 - the "LED lamp galaxy"

[Uwe Glahn]

Last new moon I stumbled over a beautiful galaxy which looks like a elongated spot which was illuminated by an LED rod lamp just above the spot - NGC 972.

The galaxy itself is bright and easy to find in Aries. It consists of a bright 1:3 elongated core with several spots and a fainter hat along the whole SW side. The hat itself has again several brighter spots, the brightest is a huge HII region at the NW end. The LED stars are three brighter stars in the SW neighborhood which forms a slightly curved lamp form. Unfortunately I had only poor seeing conditions. For sure also interesting in much smaller aperture than the 27".

27", 419x, NELM 6m5+, Seeing V
http://www.deepsky-visuell.de/Zeichnungen/NGC972.jpg
home (inverted version) (http://www.deepsky-visuell.de/Zeichnungen/NGC972.htm)

[Ivan Maly]

Great observation. I looked at this galaxy last time out (a month ago! terrible weather... there has been one decent night since but we were cut off from the dark skies by a zone of driving bans due to snow). It was a promising target but even at ~400x with 12" I couldn't make out any real detail, only its being more diffuse on the W side. That said, I probably just didn't give it enough time, as I was in the "survey mode", rushing through a bunch of objects in Aries.