NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 793. This is one of the few nebulae found by J.G. Lohse, an English amateur astronomer, working at the observatory of another amateur, Mr. Wigglesworth. Unfortunately, the observations never seem to have been published outside the NGC, so Lohse's approximate position and description as recorded in the NGC is all the information that we have. For this particular object, the NGC tells us only, "Very very faint, between two stars; south-following GC 5210 [NGC 789]." The only object in the area that fits the description is the faint double star about two arcmin southeast of Lohse's place. It is quite a faint object (it is not in GSC), so Mr. Wigglesworth must have had a considerable telescope if Lohse was to have seen it. Some digging in the literature is clearly called for to find the details we need to know about the observatory and its instruments. Without that, my possible identification, while fitting Lohse's description, can only be tentative. ----- Since I wrote that many years ago, Wolfgang Steinicke has done the historical research to find that James Wigglesworth's observatory at Scarborough in Yorkshire housed a 15.5-inch F15 Cooke refractor. This telescope was certainly capable of turning out the double star that we think might be Lohse's object, so I've changed the question mark to a colon. Lohse, by the way, was born in Germany, though worked for much of his career in Scotland with Ralph Copeland, as well as in Scarborough with Wigglesworth. Wolfgang's web pages, and his book "Observing and Cataloguing Nebulae and Star Clusters" (Cambridge, 2010), have more details for those interested.