What's the point of NGC 6199?

[spaceman_spiff]

A silly topic, but it has been bugging me for a few days...

I was looking at all the named objects in the area around M13 and I noticed NGC 6199 shown as a Dark Nebula. On Google, it is shown as a single star...I don't see how these objects made it into the NGC (I assume there must be other objects like it in the NGC).

Was it compiled more like a historical list before people really knew what the objects were? 

 

[Waddensky]

There are many objects in the original NGC that ar either stars (5.2%) or not found at the listed coordinates (1.1%). NGC 1990 is a famous example. The NGC was compiled in the 19th century, partly based on earlier observations, and long before the nature of many deep-sky objects was known.

Both Steinicke's Revised NGC and Verga's OpenNGC list NGC 6199 as a single star.

[spaceman_spiff]

Interesting...Thanks for the reply Waddensky. 6.3% of NGC objects are single stars or not locatable! That's a lot!

[Waddensky]

You're welcome! This table on Wolfgang Steinicke's website lists some other interesting statistics for both the NGC and IC catalogues.

[Paul73]

2 hours ago, Waddensky said:

You're welcome! This table on Wolfgang Steinicke's website lists some other interesting statistics for both the NGC and IC catalogues.

Now there is a man with attention to detail!!

What a through piece of work. Sadly most of it is lost on me, but part of me is comforted that someone has sorted through all of the inaccuracies and brought some order to things.😁

Paul

[Pankaj]

Just noticed that IC 4617 is 470 mly far !! Thats some distance to have captured.

[Oldfort]

Steinicke's book is fascinating.  You might not expect such an apparently dry subject to be so interesting, but he writes very well. 

Or perhaps I'm a premier league geek.

[michael8554]

My planetarium has NGC 6199 as an elliptical galaxy.

Michael

[spaceman_spiff]

There is a very faint elliptical galaxy just below and to the right of the star I labelled...it could be that.

[spaceman_spiff]

16 hours ago, Pankaj said:

Just noticed that IC 4617 is 470 mly far !! Thats some distance to have captured.

The light hitting my camera was almost half a billion years old! Quite unbelievable really...