Why is the Norma Cluster not in Norma?

[Robh (Rob)]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

The idealists who founded Wikipedia felt that their encyclopedia would encompass "the knowledge of all humankind" and thus it would be inherently self-correcting.
They were obviously wrong.

Quite a few shorter wikipedia entries on astronomy are substantially wrong, and I know that I should be "out there" correcting them, but I feel that knowledge without attribution to a particular scholar is of little permanent value.

Wikipedia is a great idea and has a lot of information on all aspects of astronomy and science. I often go to it for convenience but unfortunately what you say is true. You always have to double check the information.

A number of years ago, I was reading the wiki on the Jewel Box, which stated that the bright orange star is kappa Crucis. It still hasn't been corrected.

Regards, Rob

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by astroron

Hi Rob, just had another thought as is noted the galaxies are also only ESO numbers and as they are so far south May not have been much observed till ESO was formed.
As Robert said the center of the cluster is in Triangulum but part drifts over to Norma .
Cheers

]

Perhaps the 13th magnitude members of this cluster of galaxies had to wait for the southern Schmidt surveys, before they were discovered. Maybe they were like the Circinus Galaxy, which was discovered in the late 1970s, if memory serves me correctly.

The ESO (B) survey (or atlas) discovered some 3500 southern galaxies in the 1970s, and I suspect that some of them were as bright as 12.5-13 blue magnitude

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by Robh

Wikipedia is a great idea and has a lot of information on all aspects of astronomy and science. I often go to it for convenience but unfortunately what you say is true. You always have to double check the information.
Regards, Rob

Wikipedia is not the only source of information that perpetuates nonsense, which becomes so called "truth" through constant repetition.

Writers of general astronomy textbooks have been doing this for a long time when they make these three incorrect statements:
- The Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years across.
- Our Galaxy contains 100 billion stars
- The Andromeda Galaxy is like the Milky Way
(it sure isn't! The bulge and disk and halo properties of M31 are very different from those of the Milky Way)