NGC 1961 (Arp 184) is a distorted spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Camelopardalis.  Measuring 3.1’ x 4.5’, it shines at an overall magnitude of 10.9, according to TheSky X databases.  It seems obvious that it interacted with some of its neighbors in its past, but which ones?  It is a part of a group of at least nine galaxies that have very similar redshifts of about 0.013, indicating they lie at roughly the same distance.  

NGC 1961 shows what appears to be quite a few H-alpha emitting nebulae in its arms, but it threw me a curveball when I imaged it.  The image shown is LRGB only, and the expected pink blotches are there without any H-alpha data.  I decided to shoot some 7 nm H-alpha through the C11 EdgeHD to enhance this image, but after 90 minutes of integration, I didn’t have anything I could use.  The H-alpha stack revealed a noisy blob without any well-defined H-alpha regions.  If there are truly H-alpha emissions, I should have picked up some kind of coherent signal, as I do not think the redshift is enough to misalign the emissions with the 7 nm bandpass of the filter I was using.  However, the Esprit refractor and Chroma LRGB filters picked up some broadband red fairy easily.  If anyone has an explanation, please post a comment.

A few of the other galaxies in this image seem large and bright enough to get NGC or IC designations, but they did not.  Directly above NGC 1961 in the image are an irregular galaxy designated Z 329-11 and a faint, fuzzy neighbor that does not even have an entry in SIMBAD or LEDA, curiously enough.

To the left of that pair is the nearly edge-on type Sc galaxy UGC 3342, also known as PGC 17692.  Measuring 1.7’ x 0.4’, it is a 15th magnitude DSO.

The lovely spiral galaxy to the left of UGC 3342 is designated UGC 3344 or PGC 17675.  It is of type Sb and shines at magnitude 14.5.  Its surface brightness must be quite low, as the integration time should have been enough to bring out more details than what we’re seeing.

Immediately to the left of UGC 3344 is the 15th magnitude irregular galaxy PGC 17675 (a.k.a. MCG+12-06-013); to its upper left is UGC 3349, a 14th magnitude irregular galaxy that does not show much structure in my image.  The remaining galaxies in the image have PGC or LEDA designations and are a bit too small to reveal much detail at this image scale.