Object of the Week - March 19, 2017 - NGC 2903 = UGC 5079 = MCG +04-23-009 = CGCG 122-014 = PGC 27077 - LEO
R.A.: 09h32m09.7s Dec.: +21°30'03" (2000)
Size: 11.5'x 4.2'
Mag; V = 8.9
Big, bright and beautiful, and perfectly placed for this time of the year from just about anywhere on the planet. Even from the south end of the south island of New Zealand it almost reaches 2X airmass at its highest altitude.
NGC 2903 is a barred spiral galaxy about 20 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel who cataloged it on November 16, 1784. It is hard to understand how Charles Messier could have possibly missed this guy, when 3 of Messier's comets came quite close to it. A comet in 1760 passed it the night of March 11-12 in 1760 (less than 2° away), and his comets of 1762 and 1771 were nearby!
Here is a spectacular APOD;
In the eyepiece NGC 2903 is among the best galactic eye-candy available. Although the 2 main spiral arms are not of the in-your-face-M51 variety, they are nevertheless easy enough to see, especially out near the edge where they start to separate from the core. There is a large and faint knot in the NE or NNE edge (averted vision only for me), which is sometimes called NGC 2905, but it seems to me that most sources just say that NGC 2905 = NGC 2903. I attempted to query the NGC/IC Project page but apparently that site is no longer with us. Steve G, what's up?
As I always tend to do, I like to look around and see what else might be in the neighborhood, and about 40 arcmin to the ENE is NGC 2916, a 12.7 mag Sb spiral galaxy, and about 35 arcmin to the WSW is a sprinkling of very faint, very small galaxies, of which I believe I glimpsed 2 (MCG 4-23-5 & MCG 4-23-6), these being in the mag 15-16 range, on a good night a couple of years ago. Hey, they were there, and I have a 25", so I tried! Wouldn't you?
Here is a screenshot from SkyTools 3 showing the NGC 2903 area, and the black circle is just a 30 arcmin reference, for scale...
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