Harold Corwin

NGC 1265 = IC 312. For over a century, this has been identified with the galaxy that has also collected the numbers 3C 83.1, UGC 02651, CGCG 540-088, and MCG +07-07-052. Unfortunately, this is not the galaxy that Bigourdan discovered and included as "Big 20" in his lists of "novae".

Steve Gottlieb brought this to my attention early in 2017 after observing the Perseus Cluster with his 24-inch telescope. He picked up IC 312 (nominally found by Lewis Swift on 8 November 1888) easily, but goes on to say

...initially was stumped on NGC 1265. It took me a minute or two to notice NGC 1265 as a relatively large, diffuse glow surrounding a fairly bright star that is superimposed. The star is not evident on the DSS, but you can clearly see it on the SDSS, including its diffraction spikes. NGC 1265 supposedly has a V mag ~12, but I'm guessing that includes the star, and the glow of IC 312 at V = 13.4 was more obvious to me.

Looking into Bigourdan's observations, we find that his entry for NGC 1265 is referred to an anonymous 9th magnitude star 5m 30s east and 23.2 arcminutes north of BD +40 687. But there is no star that bright with those offsets from the BD star. However, eight arcminutes south, there is such a star, and IC 312 is at Bigourdan's measured offsets from it (+14.06s, +01'04.3" from two observations on 14 November 1884). The eight arcminute error in Bigourdan's estimated offset from the BD star is currently inexplicable, but it is clear that Bigourdan discovered IC 312 and not UGC 02651.

So, I've renamed the galaxies in my position tables. NGC 1265 is now identical to IC 312, and UGC 02651 is called "IC 312 comp".

However, this is going to be a difficult change to push beyond the small group of NGC historians -- the literature from at least 1913 (when Wolf and Kaiser published positions of Perseus Cluster galaxies in Veroff. Heidelberg 6, 131) onwards accepts UGC 02651 = 3C 83.1 as NGC 1265. Yet it is abundantly clear that the NGC 1265 identity of this galaxy is a mistake, so we're just going to have to live with the confusion. (Contrast this with NGC 4874, which see, where I've suggested sticking with the traditional identification. There are good reasons for that, of course, though they are not quite as clear as the ones leading us to NGC 1265 = IC 312.)

― NGC Notes by Harold Corwin

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