NGC1275 in Perseus

Hello, everybody!

Is there anybody out there who has observed the peculiar galaxy NGC1275 in Perseus?
I have messed around for it on a couple of occasions, but always got lost among the myriad of stars in this part of the sky.
I assume that it appears as a faint fuzzyball in most amateur telescopes. Even on photographs I find NGC1275 to be among the less appealing galaxies - just a slightly elliptical patch with some irregular mottling near the edges.
Physically, however, NGC1275 is highly interesting, and it is an enormous object located at a vast distance. Therefore it belongs to the group of objects I really would like to view directly through the eyepiece.
NGC1275 is actually the brightest member of a galaxy group, and I suppose that big scope owners also may have observed some of the fainter galaxies in this region.

Inge S

I've logged Perseus A (1275) a couple of times, but it always seems to be at the end of a long night when my eyes are getting blurry. By itself it's not much to look at, but as the heart of Abell 426 it's quite intriguing--my first visit in 9/02 I only noticed 6 galaxies within a 15' circle (most likely 1275, 1278, 1273, 1272, 1267, 1268), using a 14" dob; my second visit in 10/03, with a 16", I picked up at least 12 galaxies in a roughly E-W line over about 1/2 degree, and identified the parallelogram 1275-1278-1273-1272, which is only 7.5' along its longer diagonal. By the standards of some, that was a pretty pathetic performance! Check out the following link to Albert Highe's 1275 observing project--the parallelogram I mentioned stands out fairly clearly in his picture.

http://pw2.netcom.com/~ahighe/a426.html

--george