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Old 16-09-2021, 02:15 PM
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GUS.K (Ivan)
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NGC 253 dwarf galaxy.

For a while now, I've had a screensaver of NGC 253 on my laptop, and have noticed a smudge near the galaxy which I assumed was either a distant galaxy or a globular cluster, but either way assumed it was beyond the reach of my 18 inch scope. A while ago, I saw this article https://www.asnsw.com/index.cfm?display=1310009 from the ASNSW archives and this thread https://www.deepskyforum.com/showthr...253-dw2-anyone recently from the Deep Sky forum regarding the NGC 253 dwarf galaxies and learnt that the object was a satellite galaxy of NGC 253.
So last Wednesday night I dragged the 18 inch out of the storage shed and set about trying to spot this little galaxy. After tweaking the collimation and another half hour or so getting dark adapted I inserted a 12mm (166x) wide field eyepiece and had a look at NGC253. After a few minutes trying, I could see the very faint glow of the dwarf, so tried with a 6.5mm (308x) then a 4mm (500x) eyepiece but settled on a 9mm(222x) as providing the best view.
Locating it is not hard as it forms one corner of a trapezium but actually seeing it is a lot harder. It was mostly averted vision, but occasionally as the seeing improved momentarily, it was glimpsed with direct vision. The seeing this night was average and about 250x magnification was comfortable, 300x was useable but anything more was just wasted magnification. So I class this as a definite spot, in great seeing, this would probably be a direct vision object majority of the time at a lot higher magnification. It's placed well at the moment around midnight, plus it's an easy galaxy to locate, so if you have a larger scope, dark skies and the seeing is good, it's worth the effort to track down.
Thanks for reading.

Last edited by GUS.K; 16-09-2021 at 03:06 PM.
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Old 17-09-2021, 03:39 PM
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GUS.K (Ivan)
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After some discussion on CN, and a bit more searching on the net, looks like the satellite galaxy maybe actually a distant face on spiral galaxy. See the attached image. The objects designation is 2M J00472496- 2521253.
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Last edited by GUS.K; 21-09-2021 at 06:12 PM.
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