 Spiral Galaxy NGC 3982 displays numerous spiral arms filled with bright stars, blue star clusters, and dark dust lanes. It spans about 30,000 light years, lies about 68 million light years from Earth and can be seen with a small telescope in the constellation of Ursa Major. | |
| Alternative names | NGC |
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| Website | vizier |
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The New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (abbreviated NGC) is an astronomical catalogue of deep-sky objects compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888. The NGC contains 7,840 objects, including galaxies, star clusters and emission nebulae. Dreyer published two supplements to the NGC in 1895 and 1908, known as the Index Catalogues (abbreviated IC), describing a further 5,386 astronomical objects. Thousands of these objects are best known by their NGC or IC numbers, which remain in widespread use.
The NGC expanded and consolidated the cataloguing work of William and Caroline Herschel, and John Herschel's General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. Objects south of the celestial equator are catalogued somewhat less thoroughly, but many were included based on observation by John Herschel or James Dunlop.
The NGC contained multiple errors, but attempts to eliminate them were made by the Revised New General Catalogue (RNGC) by Jack W. Sulentic and William G. Tifft in 1973, NGC2000.0 by Roger W. Sinnott in 1988, and the NGC/IC Project in 1993. A Revised New General Catalogue and Index Catalogue (abbreviated as RNGC/IC) was compiled in 2009 by Wolfgang Steinicke and updated in 2019 with 13,957 objects.[1]