NGC 492
galaxy
NGC 492, also occasionally referred to as PGC 4976 or GC 280, is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces. It is located approximately 590 million light-years from Earth and was discovered on December 6, 1850 by Irish engineer Bindon Blood Stoney. Although John Dreyer, creator of the New General Catalogue, credits the discovery to astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, he notes that many of his claimed discoveries were made by one of his assistants. In the case of NGC 492, the discovery was made by Bindon Stoney, who discovered it along with NGC 486, NGC 490 and NGC 500 during his observation of NGC 488 using Lord Rosse's 72" telescope.
The object was initially described by Stoney as "extremely faint, small, round, 25" diameter, low surface brightness, no concentration". The position noted was "on line with a mag 12 star 3.7' NW and a faint pair of mag 14-14.5 stars 2' NW".
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1036945. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1850.
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This entry incorporates text from “NGC 492” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.