Harold Corwin

There is a faint star near Swift's place that he might have seen as an "eeF, pS, R" nebula -- but there is no sign of the "10m * s" that he mentions in the description. There must be a large error in Swift's position, but a search of the surrounding area turned up no galaxies that he might have seen with a 10th magnitude star to the south.

In August 2016, Yann Pothier made the interesting suggestion that Swift may have seen LEDA 90922 = FGC 0899. This supposes a declination error on Swift's part of -30 arcminutes, and an RA error of 21 seconds -- we've seen both sorts of errors in his lists before. There is also a star of the appropriate magnitude about 3 arcminutes to the southwest.

Arguing against this interpretation is the fact that Swift describes his object as "round", while the galaxy is almost exactly edge-on, a faint "ray". There are also two other stars, of similar brightness to the one southwest, about 5-6 arcminutes to the southeast. If this is Swift's object, why didn't he also mention these two stars? Finally, the galaxy is very faint. While Swift has several other objects of similar brightness, I think this particular one, being edgewise, would be difficult to pick up during routine sweeping. A visual confirmation would be nice to have here.

While I'm not convinced this is correct, it is certainly worth a mention.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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