NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort
(This is a very very beta version)
NGC5655
Basic Information
Location and Magnitude
Right Ascension: 14:30:51.0
Declination: +13:58:9
Constellation: BOO
Visual Magnitude: 13.2
Historic Information
Discoverer: Herschel W.
Year of discovery: 1787
Discovery aperture: 18.7
Observational
Summary description: eeF, sf of 2
Sub-type: Sc
Corwin's Notes
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NGC 5655 is not the very faint little smudge of a galaxy to which RNGC assigns
the number. Rather, it is the southeastern of a pair seen by John Herschel,
and was actually first seen by his father.
Unfortunately, JH's positions for both are off by about 2-3 arcmin to the
southeast of the true positions. This has led the modern catalogues to
give the NGC number 5648 to the preceding of the pair, and 5649 to the
following. Left with NGC 5655 unattached to any object, RNGC arbitrarily put
it on the faint object that JH could not have seen. See NGC 5648 = NGC 5649,
for more.
Why didn't WH also record NGC 5649, the northwestern of the pair? Wolfgang
Steinicke suggests that because WH had to verify NGC 5655 with his 300X
eyepiece, this left the equally faint NGC 5649 at the edge of the 8 arcmin
300X field where it escaped his notice.
Steve's Notes
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NGC 5655
17.5" (6/24/95): fairly faint, fairly small, slightly elongated NW-SE, 1.0'x0.8', weak concentration. Located on a line between two mag 13.5 stars 1.3' NNW and 1.8' SSE from center. There are two mag 7 and 8 less than 30' following. Forms a pair with similar NGC 5649 5.5' NW. This galaxy is identified as NGC 5649 in all modern catalogues!