Harold Corwin

IC 1846; is it also NGC 1109? Javelle went over this field about 40 years after Marth's first reconnaissance of it. He measured only four of the nebulae here, but his positions are good enough to unmistakably identify all four. Would that Marth's positions were as good! See NGC 1109 for a discussion.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

Harold Corwin

NGC 1109 (= IC 1846?), NGC 1111, NGC 1112, NGC 1113, NGC 1115, NGC 1116, NGC 1117, and NGC 1127. Of these eight nebulae, all found on a single night in 1863 by Albert Marth with William Lassell's 48-inch reflector, only three -- NGC 1115, NGC 1116, and NGC 1127 -- can be readily identified. All but one of the others can be force-fit to galaxies in area, but only by changing RA differences from galaxy to galaxy. The declinations are pretty good, assuming that the RA differences noted below are in fact leading us to the correct objects.

All we have here to help decipher the field are Marth's positions -- five of them clearly wrong -- and descriptions -- all of them sparse. Here are my tentative conclusions, with Marth's data on the first line (my comments follow in parentheses), and the modern positions (for J2000.0) on the second:

             RA  (2000.0)  Dec       Description and comments

   NGC 1109   02 49 39     +13 15.1      vF (Marth's RA 2.0 min off?)
              02 47 43.6   +13 15 19     = IC 1846 = UGC 2265 = CGCG 440-008

   NGC 1111   02 49 43     +13 14.0      F, vS, stell (Marth's RA 1.0 min off?)
              02 48 39.4   +13 15 34     = IC 1850.  Faint comp 0.4 arcmin s.

   NGC 1112   02 50 00     +13 13.0      F, pS (Marth's RA 1.0 min off?)
              02 49 00.4   +13 13 26     = IC 1852 = UGC 2293 = CGCG 440-015

   NGC 1113   02 50 08     +13 18.0      vF (Marth's position on * 10).
              02 50 05.1   +13 19 39     = * 15.

   NGC 1115   02 50 25     +13 15.0      vF
              02 50 25.4   +13 15 58     = CGCG 440-020

   NGC 1116   02 50 35     +13 19.9      vF
              02 50 35.7   +13 20 06     = UGC 2326 = CGCG 440-021

   NGC 1117   02 50 43     +13 09.9      Close to a small * (RA 30 sec off?  Is
                                           the comp 0.4 arcmin n the "small *"?)
                                           This may also be = IC 1855 (which see).
              02 51 13.1   +13 11 07     = CGCG 440-022s = UGC 2337s

   NGC 1127   02 52 51     +13 14.6      vF
              02 52 51.9   +13 15 23     = CGCG 440-024 = UGC 2356

As I implied, the RA differences strike me as rather ad hoc if I have the correct objects, so these are tentative conclusions.

Javelle went over this field in January 1896; there is at least one problem with his observations, too, perhaps more. See IC 1855 for that story.

― NGC Notes by Harold Corwin

Courtney Seligman

Albert Marth observed eight nebulae, subsequently listed as NGC 1109, NGC 1111, NGC 1112, NGC 1113, NGC 1115, NGC 1116, NGC 1117 and NGC 1127, on a single night in 1863. Of those, only three have positions that seem to more or less reliably correspond to actual objects -- NGC 1115, NGC 1116 and NGC 1127. NGC 1117 can be fit to a nearby galaxy, but its identification is far less certain, and NGC 1113 cannot be convincingly connected to any object. Still, that is not as complicated as the situation for NGC 1109, NGC 1111 and NGC 1112, each of which has two or more candidates for what Marth might have observed, and for several of those candidates, more than one suggestion as to which of Marth's objects a given candidate might correspond to; so for those NGC entries there is little if any hope that there will ever be a convincing argument for which objects correspond to which entries.

― Courtney Seligman, Celestial Atlas

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