NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 1554 and NGC 1555 are both involved with the young variable star T Tauri. They are among the most notorious of the nebulae found during the 19th century as they are the only nebulae certainly known to vary in brightness -- even to the point of disappearing, as NGC 1554 has done. They are most likely reflection nebulae, created as thick dust clouds near the star move about, mostly casting shadows, but occasionally letting "shafts of sunlight" out to illuminate the surrounding dense interstellar gas and dust. Nebulae were first noticed around the star by Hind in the 1850's, and were later observed by d'Arrest, Struve, and Dreyer among others. Dreyer has brief synopses of the observations in the NGC and IC Notes, and points (in the IC2 Notes) to a paper by Barnard in Monthly Notices which details most of the history of the T Tauri nebulae up to about 1900. For all the fuss that these nebulae created in the 19th century, they are all quite small and very faint at the present time. As I noted above, NGC 1554 is not visible on the Palomar Sky Survey plates (taken in the early 1950's). Also not visible is a nebula seen only by Bigourdan (B. 144; mislabeled as B. 143 by him in his big table). He makes its position 04 19 09.5, +19 21 51 (B1950.0) from a single observation on 12 Dec 1890. This is about 4 arcmin southeast of T Tauri in a blank patch of sky. Still, observers might find it fascinating to monitor the area for changes.

===== NGC 1554 17.5" (11/10/96): at the position of Struve's Lost Nebula (reported by Otto Struve in 1868) is a mag 14 star noted in the observation of NGC 1555 (Hind's Variable Nebula). This star is 4' WSW of T Tauri and is not involved with nebulosity.