NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 3853. Wolfgang Steinicke has suggested that this galaxy was actually discovered by WH on 30 December 1783, early in WH's amazing first year of sweeping the sky with his 20-foot reflector. WH says of it (from CH's fair copy in the Herschel Archives): Some minutes after 32 [clock time] I saw a S Neb. but in looking a good while at the finder to determine is [sic] place lost it again. I suspect partly that it only consisted of a few vS st. but shall look for it another night. 95 (o) Leonis f .... n 0[deg] 54[arcmin] RA 11h 3[min]:: .. PD 72[deg] 20[arcmin]. It never made it into WH's catalogues, probably because of the uncertain RA. He certainly never recorded it again, so probably did not search for it as he said he would. There are only three objects in the sweep: this one, 95 Leo, and NGC 4028 (which see). Unfortunately, WH did not record a time for the transit of the star (or the first nebula), so had no way to reduce the right ascensions of the two nebulae. He managed to find an approximate position for NGC 4028 using the clock correction from the previous sweep on the same night, but with no time recorded for this nebula, only an approximate RA could be deduced -- and it is well off the true value which should be 11 34 06, 72 20. However, the declinations for all three objects are correct, and the objects at least occur in the sweep in the same order as they appear on the sky. It was left to Alphonse Borelly to rediscover NGC 3853 in 1872 (and he measured it micrometrically), so he is its sole observer credited by Dreyer in the NGC.

===== NGC 3853 17.5" (3/29/89): fairly faint, fairly small, elongated NW-SE, halo increases to a small bright core.