Harold Corwin

NGC 5747 = IC 4493. William Herschel's single discovery observation is about 50 seconds of time too far east. Bigourdan looked for NGC 5747 at William Herschel's position and of course saw nothing. He did find the object, however, and measured it twice. He included it in his 4th list of new nebulae, so it received a number in the second IC. Herschel's note on the object, quoted by Dreyer in the 1912 reprinting of Herschel's papers, reads, "An extremely faint nebula, it is small and required some time to look at before it could be well seen." This helps to explain the position error, but errors of this size are not uncommon in others of William Herschel's observations.

The object itself is a double interacting system. The two galaxies are so closely connected that I've adopted a mean position for the NGC/IC numbers.

― NGC Notes by Harold Corwin

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