New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters (NGC)

A catalogue of non-stellar objects compiled by J. L. E. Dreyer of Armagh Observatory and published in 1888. It listed 7,840 objects. A further 1,529 were listed in a supplement that appeared seven years later, called the Index Catalogue (IC). The Second Index Catalogue of 1908 extended the supplementary list to 5,386 objects. The NGC and IC numbers are widely used to identify non-stellar astronomical objects. The NGC got its title because the project was seen as a development of John Herschel's General Catalogue of Nebulae, which had been published in 1864.