Discovery Of Southern NGC Objects

by Glen Cozens

Here is a summary of southern deep-sky objects.

There are 1420 NGC objects south of declination -28.0 degrees according to the book "NGC 2000.0" . Most of these were first seen by four men, Sir John Herschel (1056 objects), James Dunlop (222), Sir William Herschel (30), and Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (22). If we use the European Southern Observatory (ESO) catalogue to determine object types we get the following breakdown including objects in the Magellanic Clouds.

Discovery Of NGC Objects South Of Declination -28 Degrees.

 NAME           OC      GC      DN      PN      Gx      Total

 J Herschel     217     56      67      15      701     1056
 J Dunlop       87      52      33      4       46      222
 W Herschel     6       6       0       0       18      30
 Lacaille       13      5       3       0       1       22
 Marth          0       0       3       0       3       6
 Swift          0       0       0       0       6       6
 Schmidt        0       0       0       0       4       4

Three objects each were found by Copeland, Hodierna, Messier and Barnard. Leavenworth found two objects, while Ptolemy, Al-Sufi, Halley, Pickering and the Melbourne telescope found one each south of declination -28.

Hartmut Frommert
Christine Kronberg
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Last Modification: May 8, 2001