NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 4199. Dreyer has a note in his 1912 collection of WH's papers that caught my curiosity: "Also observed in Sw. 953, Mar. 19, 1790, 76 Ursae p. 27m 59s, s. 2d 50', or I.253, f. 13m 47s, s. 1d 59'. This agrees well with the place of Bigourdan, which is = N.G.C. -37s +4'." This seems to suggest that WH might have seen two nebulae here, not just one. However, reducing his observations, I find just a single galaxy with considerable scatter in WH's reduced positions. For 2000, those positions and the reference objects are: 12 14 31 +59 57.9 69 Ursae Majoris 12 14 26 +59 57.5 71 Ursae Majoris 12 14 44 +59 52.0 76 Ursae Majoris 12 14 44 +59 54.8 I.253 = NGC 4036 Only the last is fairly close to the faint double galaxy that WH must have seen. It has a superposed star involved, too, that must have enhanced its visibility a bit. I've taken all three objects as WH's object, though the southwestern galaxy is the brighter of the pair. While I suggested earlier that the star might be brighter than either galaxy, it is actually the second-brightest of the three objects, at least in V. The southwestern galaxy is therefore almost certainly the object that WH saw. Bigourdan found the correct object, but made two errors in transcribing his observations for publication. First, he makes his declination offset negative instead of positive; and second, he has a -1 minute error in the RA offset between BD +60 1384 and his actual comparison star, a 12th magnitude star fortunately picked up in the Astrographic Catalogue zone; this means that we have a good position for it at an epoch close to Bigourdan's observation date. Once these problems are corrected, Bigourdan's position falls within a few arcsec of the star superposed on the galaxy pair. The galaxies, by the way, are probably members of the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 1507. The redshift of the northeastern galaxy is z = 0.0612, while that of the southwestern is z = 0.0605; the redshift of the cluster is z = 0.0604.

===== NGC 4199 17.5" (5/13/88): very faint, very small. A mag 15 star is involved at the north end just 16" from center and a mag 16 star is involved at the east end 24" from the center. NGC 4195 lies 18' SSW. On the POSS, the mag 16 star I recorded is actually an extremely faint and small companion (VV 183b)! This is the brightest galaxy in AGC 1507.