New General Catalogue (NGC)

In 1888, John Louis Emil Dreyer assembled the New General Catalogue (commonly but redundantly referred to as the NGC Catalogue). It contains 7,840 objects of all varieties including galaxies, star clusters, nebulas, and galaxy clusters, to name a few. The entries are so numerous and comprehensive, if you could throw a rock hard enough, you would likely hit an NGC object.

The NGC Catalogue consolidates and extends the much earlier work of German-British brother and sister team of astronomers William and Caroline Herschel who did most of their work in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The NGC Catalogue originally contained a number of errors that have since been revised and corrected.

Dreyer later supplemented the NGC Catalogue with a new catalogue he named the Index Catalogue (IC). I have treated the IC Catalogue (also redundant in the common parlance) separately on this website. There is a great deal of overlap between the NGC Catalogue and other catalogues such as the Messier, Sharpless, and vdB catalogues.

Beyond collaborating on some kind of monumental all-sky survey team, shooting every NGC object is well out of reach for an amateur astronomer. But many NGC objects are favorite targets in the astrophotography community. Some of those appear below. Note that I have not included every image that contains an NGC object below. That would make this gallery little different from the main full-portfolio gallery. What I have included are the most well-known and recognizable of the NGC targets.