2012 May 06 at 13:20

A nearby barred spiral galaxy with a side-order of beautifully coloured stars.

Outside the main stream of the Milky Way, 8° due north of Crux, lies second-magnitude gamma Cen. Due east is the spectacular naked-eye globular cluster omega Cen. Halfway between these two is the wide fourth-magnitude stellar pair Xi-1 and Xi-2 Cen, and between these two stars lies the beautiful NGC 4945. Located some 12 million light years away in the nearby Centaurus A galaxy group, NGC 4945 is a barred spiral galaxy spanning 57,000 light years across.

NGC 4945, the Golden Coin Galaxy, is an easy visual target, appearing as a ghostly slash hanging in black space between two 4.5-magnitude stars, making it one of the easiest bright galaxies to find.

The French doyen of galaxies, Gerard de Vaucouleurs, drew attention to NGC 4945 in his photographic survey of southern galaxies made with the 30-inch Reynolds reflector at Mount Stromlo Observatory, Australia. He noted it was "one of the largest late-type spirals at a very low latitude; little known." De Vaucouleurs added that an earlier reference to NGC 4945 was made by John Henry Reynolds. Reynolds, examining photographs of spiral nebulae, wrote that NGC 4945 was "of unusual type, complicated irregular ring, much inclined to line of sight with no nucleus, the south-western half being very faint."

NGC 4945, imaged by Dale Liebenberg