NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 7571 may be NGC 7597. Or it may be NGC 7578. Or maybe not. Here is Schultz's entire note from page 103 of his 1874 monograph on the object (I've expanded his abbreviations): "A poor stellar group of pretty bright stars follows the above nebulae [N7547, N7549, and N7550] about 1 1/2 minutes; and the whole region following this stellar group seems nebulous: [Schultz italics] a group of small nebulae or a considerably extended nebulosity with several knots? [end italics] As yet the sky was not sufficiently dark, and the nebulosity very faint and indistinct, no decision could be arrived at. This nebulosity independently remarked in the autumns 1867 and 1869, as on the second occasion the elder notice was forgotten. Description and position do not at all agree with III. 181 [N7550]!" There is no such group of bright stars 1.5 minutes following the N7550 galaxy group. The stellar group is instead 1.5 minutes of time following NGC 7578 (coincidentally, RNGC makes N7571=N7578; it probably isn't unless Schultz got his direction wrong and the nebulosity is PRECEDING the stellar group). But Schultz would have had to misidentify N7578 as N7547 or N7550. This, I admit, is a bit of a stretch. But the group of stars is 3.3 minutes following the N7550 group, as well as nearly 20 arcmin to the south. Schultz would probably have been aware of that considerable difference. Scattered around through the bright stars are several galaxies, four of which (N7588, N7597, N7598, and N7602) Marth ran across about the same time using Lasalle's great telescope in Malta. These are bright enough that Schultz could have pulled them out with his 9.6-inch. So, I've tentatively put NGC 7571 on the brightest of Marth's galaxies, N7597. The other possibility is that of RNGC's: N7571 is the same as N7578. N7578 is double and is the brightest in a tight group of galaxies (Hickson 94). This would be in accord with Schultz's description of his object as possibly being a group of nebulae. However, it also requires Schultz to make a mistake in his directions. Also, N7578 is considerably fainter than N7550 or N7597 -- but either of these hypotheses requires that Schultz saw N7578. I'm leaning slightly toward the N7597 hypothesis, but the other could well be the correct one. ----- On a somewhat more practical level, Schultz left us no position for NGC 7571, so I suppose that Dreyer himself worked it out for the GC Supplement. This was copied correctly into the NGC. Bigourdan provides a "corrected" RA in the IC2 Notes, but he observed a double star at 23 17 10.6, +18 58 02 (J2000, UCAC) not the kind of object that would match Schultz's rather unusual description. Wolfgang adopted Bigourdan's double in his 1997 list of NGC objects, though in his 2010 book, makes the object identical with NGC 7597. This may be as good an identification as any other, but I am still skeptical given the problems in Schultz's note. So, the question marks that I put on this earlier stay firmly in place. And then I looked at NGC 7578 again -- "... a group of small nebulae or a considerably extended nebulosity with several knots?" That seems to describe N7578 and its accompanying nebulae and stars pretty well. So, is this Schultz's mystery object? See the last two sentences of the previous paragraph!

===== NGC 7571 See observing notes for NGC 7597. =**?, Bigourdan and Reinmuth. =NGC 7578, RNGC.