New General Catalogue

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New General Catalogue (NGC)
Spiral Galaxy NGC 3982 displays numerous spiral arms filled with bright stars, blue star clusters, and dark dust lanes. It spans about 30,000 light years, lies about 68 million light years from Earth and can be seen with a small telescope in the constellation of Ursa Major.
Organization	William Herschel at the Dunsink Observatory of the Royal Astronomical Society
Data sources	William Herschel Birr Castle telescope Dunsink Observatory (revised by Sulentic and Tifft)
Goals	Survey of non-stellar objects
Data products	NGC Catalogue
Website Revised New General Catalogue

The New General Catalogue (NGC) is the best-known catalogue of deep sky objects in amateur astronomy. It contains nearly 8,000 objects, known as the NGC objects. The NGC is one of the largest comprehensive catalogues, as it includes all types of deep space objects (not specialised to just galaxies for instance).

The catalogue was compiled in the 1880s by J. L. E. Dreyer using observations mostly from William Herschel, and then subsequently expanded with two Index Catalogues (IC I & IC II), adding nearly 5,000 objects.

Objects in the southern hemisphere sky are somewhat less thoroughly catalogued, but many were observed by John Herschel. The NGC contained many errors which have for the most part been eliminated by The NGC/IC Project www.ngcic.org

The NGC was published in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society as "A New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, being the Catalogue of the late Sir John F.W. Herschel, Bart., revised, corrected, and enlarged." (Dreyer J. L. E., 1888, Mem. R. Astron. Soc., 49, 1-237).^[1]