NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 1327. This is L.M. 105, found by Ormond Stone with the 26-inch refractor at the Leander McCormick Observatory in Virginia. He describes it simply as "vS, neb?" and assigns a magnitude of 16.3. His position is typically uncertain with nothing resembling his description nearby. There is a faint galaxy (MCG -04-09-008) 0.6 minutes of time east of his RA and at the correct declination. Since the early Leander McCormick positions, not just Stone's, tend to be too far west, this object is a logical candidate. However, Delisle Stewart examined a Bruce reflector plate taken at Harvard's Arequipa station in Peru, and noticed a faint triple star near Stone's place. ESO has suggested that the wide triple about 2.5 arcmin north of Stone's place is Stewart's object. Since the stars in the triple are 13th and 14th magnitude, and since they are spread out along a line nearly an arcminute long, I doubt that they would appear as a "vS" nebula of the 16th magnitude in the 26-inch, even on a night of spectacularly bad seeing. Stewart created some additional confusion by simply precessing Stone's crude position to equinox 1900. This, together with his comment in Harvard Annals 60, "3 vF sts, close together, no neb," summarized by Dreyer in the IC2 Notes, would lead us to believe that the triple is at Stone's position. All of this makes me unhappy with Stewart's hypothesis, but I've nevertheless retained the triple in the main table as a possibility for N1327.

===== NGC 1327 24" (12/1/13): at 260x appeared very faint, very small, elongated 3:2 N-S, 18"x12". Visible ~80% of the time with averted. Situated 2.5' ENE of a mag 10.7 star. MCG -04-09-010 lies 9.4' ESE.