Not the Grus Quartet

[Paddy]

Spent a bit of time last night exploring galaxies in Grus that are not part of the famous quartet. Some of them were pretty impressive in spite of fairly poor conditions for galaxy observing.

Oh, but I did also look at the Quartet first as well as some other old favourites, but these aren't in the notes.

Observation notes 12/11/2015

Telescope 400mm f4.9 tri-dob reflector
Eyepieces 28mm UWAN, 17 mm,13 mm Ethoses, 9 mm Nagler, Paracorr
Navigation: Uranometria, Night Sky Observer’s Guide


2130 Seeing fair, transparency fair

NGC 7496 Galaxy in Grus

175x quite an impressive north-east obvious barred spiral galaxy space 4’x5’ with northwest to southeast bar, faint central brightening, short east curving arm from north end of bar and a short west curving arm from the south end. There is a faint foreground star at the north end.

NGC 7531 Gx in Grus
175x 2’x1’ North-south oval glow with central brightness and an impression of some mottling

NGC 7424 Gx in Grus
250x faint but large face-on spiral, 6’ across with bright core & faint arms. There is an impression of dark spaces between arms, but the shape of the arms is hard to discern under these conditions.

NGC 7462 Galaxy in Grus
175x Striking bright and narrow 5’ long east-west sliver of light with foreground star at western end. The western half is significantly fainter than the eastern.

NGC 7456 Galaxy in Grus
175x Large faint 5’x2’ north-south oval glow, quite uniform in appearance.

NGC 7410 Galaxy in Grus
250x Bright SW-NE 5’x2’ glow with marked core and the impression of some mottling. There is a faint foreground star a few minutes west of NE end.

NGC 7412 Galaxy in Grus
250x 3’ dia round glow with slight central brightening and perhaps a few dark spaces in what appears a fairly uniform disc.

[pgc hunter]

Good stuff Paddy. Grus is a nice playground indeed. Your obs of NGC 7424 has caught my eye, an object I have also observed. You obviously fared better with your 16" than myself with my 8" from suburban skies!

My obs from August 23, 2014 with the 8" under good transparency:
NGC 7424
GX, Grus, Mag V= 10.5, SB= 14.9

This is a large face on spiral and as such, a painfully low surface brightness object. A small, faint, diffuse and weakly condensed core was seen at 92x. No hints of any surrounding haze. A mag 12 and mag 13.5 star pair resides approx 3.5' north of the core.

A similar face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 5332, is not far away in Sculptor. On the same night, this appeared fainter than 7424, basically just a very faint haze according to my notes.

cheers and looking forward to more reports!

[Paddy]

Thanks Sab, I'll have a look at that one. The night after this report was the best for galaxy observing that I've seen in years. I revisited all these objects and a few others, but didn't make notes.

[Tinderboxsky]

Thanks for posting. I enjoyed your report.
Cheers
Steve

[pgc hunter]

Oh damn that would've made for some good reading. Almost every night is clear here but I can't even get to my scopes because there is still too much crap in the way from the move. I am going to finally attack the spirals, a category of gx which were basically unobservable from Melbourne.

[glenc]

Thanks Paddy for your interesting descriptions. I looked the galaxies up on http://server1.wikisky.org/