Observations of NGC3473

These are the observations available for NGC3473. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.

• Back to Leo

  I wasn't totally expecting a session last night but I was happy to oblige thank you :) My sky was a good one! I picked out Sue French's Deep Sky wonders from the shelf for inspiration and settled on NGC 3501 as a starting point as it was the faintest thing listed in 'Leo's 11th hour' I also checked my NGC files to ensure that I hadn't observed it before!

  First: NGC 3501 in Leo, nice relatively small , clean sided edge on magnitude 12.9, only points of note were a central region obviously brighter with small nucleus, this region didn't 'bulge' as is common but actually gave the galaxy a slim waisted appearance. Two faint stars stand guard at the northern tip.

  

  Second: Lying just North of the first observation, also listed in Sue's book but I hadn't noted that fact until this write up! This magnitude 10.9 barred spiral, NGC 3507, was the finest object of the night! The main spiral appeared as a over-extended backwards letter 'S'. A foreground star lies over the galaxy and is brighter than the nucleus to its right. Outer arms form a diffuse halo that took a long video camera integration time of 21 secs to be sure of.

  

  Third: A nice contrasting pair arranged north and south of a reasonably bright star. NGC 3454 is an edge on, clean sided no brightening or other features. NGC 3455 is to the south, another grain or seed shaped galaxy bright central nuclear region which extends slightly NW-SE. An interesting pair.

  

  Fourth: A small cluster, principle members are NGCs 3473 and 3474 with a number of small faint unknown galaxies in the field. I should imagine through most scopes the main galaxies would appear stellar. The difficulty of resolution being exacerbated by the fact that NGC 3476 appears closely associated with a bright star, its galactic halo extending around the star itself. NGC 3473 to the south is plain slightly elongated E-W.

  

  Started 10.30 BST, closed down 01.30, most enjoyable.

  Dale Holt - (25 April 2020).