The New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars was compiled by J.L.E. Dreyer in 1887 with about 8000 objects, and is still in use.
I was miffed to find it does not contain an entry for our very own galaxy, aka The Milky Way, arguably the most important in the Universe! The first entry, NGC 1, is some 13th magnitude galaxy in Pegasus. It's not really surprising that the NGC doesn’t include The Milky Way, since we are embedded in it and it subtends 180° of the sky to each observer.
Nonetheless, I hereby propose that The Milky Way, should be granted pride-of-place in the catalogue, as NGC 0, the Centre of the Universe, with right ascension 0:0 hours, declination 0:0 degrees, apparent diameter 10800 arcminutes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment