Harold Corwin

The identity is not sure. Swift has left us three different positions for his 19th nebula in his 7th list from Echo Mountain. He found the galaxy on 31 January 1898, within just a few months of his final nebular discoveries (the three positions are in the table).

The IC description reads "B, S, lE, *9 sf [?119deg 14.5']" (Dreyer's query, not mine). Swift's description in the big AN "Catalogue No. 11 ..." reads simply "B, S, lE", so the additional information must come from one of the smaller lists. It is indeed found in the Monthly Notices (58, 332, 1898) version where he adds "9m * near sf".

After a search of the area, Andris and I settled on ESO 442-G026 as Swift's object. This is the brightest object around, it is an even 50 seconds of time from one of Swift's positions -- but it does not have a bright star nearby. The brightest star to the east is a 10th or 11th magnitude star 6.5 arcminutes east. There are somewhat fainter ones 6 arcminutes southeast and south-southwest.

The other candidate is ESO 442-G024: larger, fainter, with a lower surface brightness, and surrounded by 9th magnitude stars: 2.5 arcmin northeast, 4 arcmin south, and 6.5 arcmin southwest. Swift would have seen all of these and would probably have commented on them. He would also have probably called the galaxy "eeF, vS" at best. Still, I suppose it is possible that his is his object, so I've put it in the table, too, though with question marks.

Looking at this again in May 2017, I think ESO 442-G026 must be Swift's galaxy. The bright star is HD 11948, and is 17.3 arcminutes distant in position angle 125+-. This more or less matches what Dreyer has in the IC2. What I do not know is where Dreyer got the numbers he quotes in his queried separation. If these came from Swift, they would have been in a letter to Dreyer. They are certainly not in either of Howe's MNRAS papers where he provides observations and corrected positions for objects in Swift's 11th list (60, 130, 1899 and 61, 29, 1900). There may be another source of comments on Swift's paper that I do not know about. Any clues?

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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