Abstract
THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY'S MEMOIRS.—The first part of vol. xlix. of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society has just been published, and contains a new General Catalogue of nebulæ, by Dr. J. L. E. Dreyer. Sir John Herschel's General Catalogue, published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1864, was almost entirely founded upon his own and his father's observations, and hence, since several observers have devoted themselves to the work of searching for nebulæ since that catalogue was prepared, the number known to us has been very largely increased. D'Arrest's great work on nebulæ, which appeared three years later than the General Catalogue, gave the means of correcting many of its positions, and hence Dr. Dreyer had been induced as early as 1876 to compile a supplement to the General Catalogue, which he published in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in 1878 (vol. xxvi.), containing a list of corrections to it, and a catalogue of recently-discovered nebulæ. In 1886, Dr. Dreyer presented a second similar supplement—in which the later discoveries of Messrs. Stephan, Swift, Ormond Stone, and other observers had been incorporated—to the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society; but the Council, considering that the General Catalogue was practically out of print, and that the use of three catalogues and two lists of corrections would be very inconvenient, proposed to Dr. Dreyer that he should prepare from the whole of his materials a single new General Catalogue. This work he has now carried out, and the present catalogue contains 7840 objects, the positions of which have been as thoroughly corrected and revised as the materials available permitted. The epoch of the first General Catalogue, and of D'Arrest's final positions—1860—has heen retained, as it is close to the epochs of the great star-charts of Argelander, Schönfeld, Chacornac, and Peters, and nearly all the modern micrometric observations of nebulæ are referred to an epoch but little later. The precessions have been given for 1880, as done by Sir John Herschel, and the descriptions have been carefully revised. The work also contains an index to published figures of nebulæ and clusters, and an appendix giving the places of several new nebulæ discovered by Prof. Safford and Mr. Swift, but published too late to be incorporated in the catalogue itself. These are added that the volume may contain a complete record of all nebulæ of which the places have been published up to December 1887.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 37, 353 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037353a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037353a0