William Herschel discovered NGC 450 = H III-440 on 1 Oct 1785 (sweep 448) and logged as "vF, vL, requires great attention." His RA was 25 tsec too large, but Heinrich d'Arrest provided an accurate position used in the NGC. This system is a noninteracting spiral pair with the companion (UGC 807) over 6 times as distant.

300/350mm - 13.1" (9/3/86): very large, diffuse, broad concentration, slightly elongated. Located 12.5' NE of 38 Ceti.

900/1200mm - 48" (10/22/11): at 610x this double system is dominated by NGC 450, which appeared bright, large, 2.3' diameter. Sharply concentrated with a relatively large 30" bright core, surrounded by a very large, low surface brightness halo. The halo is slightly asymmetric and more extensive on the west side.

Three faint "stars" are superimposed on the east side of the galaxy; two appeared stellar, but the faintest and most westerly object was clearly "soft" at 610x. These are apparently HII knots in the galaxy and the southeast object is listed in NED as UM 311 from the University of Michigan Emission Line Survey.

NGC 450 has a very close companion, UGC 807, which is attached at the northeast side of the halo, 1.4' between centers. UGC 807 appeared fairly faint, fairly small, elongated 5:2 SW-NE, 0.7'x0.3', even surface brightness except for a very small brighter nucleus. Despite the fact that UGC 807 appears to form a double system, the companion has a redshift that is over 6x greater than NGC 450, so they are a line-of-sight pair.

Notes by Steve Gottlieb