NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 4446 and NGC 4447. I grumble and gripe about Swift's poor positions all through these notes, but I do have to take my hat off to him for his keen and practiced eyes. These two galaxies surprised me as I worked my way through the many brighter objects in the plane of the Local Supercluster -- who could have found these faint things? Lewis Swift! He was using a 16-inch refractor that was apparently quite good optically, and his observing location and techniques insured that he could fairly often pick up 14th and even 15th magnitude galaxies. While it is true that his positions for even these two lack the final polish of a micrometer, they are good enough to insure that we can recover the galaxies today. Unfortunately, the Mt. Wilson and Harvard observers saw the two positions southeast of the pair and decided that both apply to the single brighter southeastern object. Swift's description for NGC 4446 should set any such concerns aside: "eeF, pS, R, ee diff; D, triplicity suspected; 2 = mag sts range with it n and s; 3012 [NGC 4459] in field f." For NGC 4447, found the same night (17 April 1787), he merely says, "eeF, pS, R; ee diff." (I think he put the second galaxy in his 6th list to insure that it did not get lost in the description for the first.) The note about the stars is not as clear as it could be -- the two stars are directly north of NGC 4447 and are aligned with the galaxy. In any event, Swift certainly saw the two objects here, and gave us positions just good enough to recover them.

===== NGC 4446 24" (5/29/14): faint, very small, slightly elongated E-W, 0.5'x0.4', low even surface brightness. Fainter of a pair(lower surface brightness) with NGC 4447 1.6' SE. Located 13' WSW of NGC 4459. 18" (4/5/03): very faint, very small, elongated 3:2 E-W, 0.6'x0.4'. Forms a similar pair with NGC 4447 1.6' ESE. Two mag 12.5/13 stars are 2' and 3' N of the pair. Located 7' WSW of a mag 9.6 star and 13' WSW of NGC 4459.