János Kernya and his friends - who were staying at the neighboring farm (Isabis) - visited us at Hakos one day. We chatted about our observations so far and various deep-sky targets. Jani suggested this 12.4^m bright edge-on galaxy in the constellation Antlia. I didn't know about it at all but I found it fascinating so I decided to draw it. It bears a strong resemblance to NGC 891 in the northern hemisphere which is one of my favorite galaxies. At this point we were on our third-to-last night and we were very exhausted. I recall that I wasn’t really enjoying the drawing any more. However the galaxy is undeniably beautiful. The dust lane is visible across the core region though it is quite subtle. I couldn’t trace it any further outwards. The tiny bright spot to the left of the core might be a foreground star. Guide 9.0 indicates a 16.9^m star at that location.

Comparison with the photograph

You can see the Digitized Sky Survey (POSS II red)  photo on the left next to my inverted drawing. I rotated and cropped the photo to sort-of match the crop of my drawing. As you can see the galaxy revealed quite a lot of its beauty in the eyepiece.