This week’s OOTW is a memory trip to my early observing days. When I was a kid, I enjoyed going to the library and checking out various astronomy books. In one of the picture books of galaxies, I saw a photo of a galaxy that looked odd, much like a golf club in a rich field of galaxies that stuck to me. At the time, I had no idea that it was a cluster of galaxies. I had only a 6” reflector at the time and had no hope of seeing it. About 5 years later, in 1980, I picked up an 8” reflector and hoped to see it. I failed after a few attempts. I was observing from my backyard, which wasn’t dark at all as I wasn’t old enough to drive.
During my early “serious” observing years with my 8” reflector, I picked up a series of observing books deemed as classics today. Among my favorites were Burnham’s, Webb Society Deep Sky Observer’s Handbook, Sky Altas 2000.0 and Vehrenberg’s Deep sky Splendors. I’m sure there are others, but those are my favorites. Oh, there is the AstroCards by Glen Sanner and George Kepple. Yes, I still have the hand drawn version! I'm mentioning all that is because I love going poring through the resources for observing targets. My Sky Atlas had about a dozen annotations from back then and this weeks OOTW was one of them. It was much fainter than the other added objects, but this is the impact NGC 6045 made on me when I was a young.
After grad school, I finally was able to afford a 16” reflector. I took it up to Blue Canyon one day and went for it. I was so happy to finally see it! I didn’t see the companion that formed the “club’ part. I saw it with a bunch of other galaxies in the field. It was way cool!
Under dark skies with my 22”, I took some time and had a pretty good observation. Here are my notes “NGC 6045 is a considerably faint, 4:1 elongated patch with an almost stellar nucleus. PA = 100 and about 60” long. Kicking it to 528x, the west end took a slight curve towards the north. The east tip took a 60 degree turn to the south and it is a little brighter than the halo, but fainter than the nucleus. The eastern tip is MAC 1605+1745."
This object isn’t the kind of challenge object that I normally post, but a fun object in a rich field of galaxies with a higher than usual percentage of spiral galaxies. Many Abell galaxy clusters tend to have more ellipticals than Abell 2151.
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