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".
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.
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