John Herschel discovered NGC 7697 = h3998 on 6 Sep 1836 and recorded "eeF; pL; 40"; very difficult but certain". His position in the CGH catalogue is accurate, but his declination in the GC is 9' too far south. Then Dreyer made another clerical error and his NGC RA was 3.0 minutes too large. He later mentioned the misprint and corrected the RA in the IC 2 Notes.

DeLisle Stewart found this galaxy again in 1900 on an Arequipa plate and reported IC 5533 = HN 784 as "cB, S, edge of plate, susp." His position is off by only 1.5'. So, NGC 7697 = IC 5533 = ESO 110-012. PGC and HyperLEDA identify ESO 110-012 as IC 5333 only. RC3 misidentifies ESO 110-014 as NGC 7697. ESO-LV identifies both ESO 110-012 and ESO 110-014 as NGC 7697. RNGC classifies this number as a galaxy but reported the erroneous NGC position! So, there are numerous identification missteps.

600/800mm - 25" (10/15/17 - OzSky): at 397x; fairly faint to moderately bright, very thin edge-on ~8:1 E-W, ~1.2'x0.15', tapers at the tips, contains a thin brighter elongated core. The galaxy is at the eastern vertex of a triangle with a mag 11 star 4' SW and a mag 12.5 star 3.5' NW. Also a mag 14.3 star is 1.7' ENE, along with a 15.2 star 1.6' ESE.

Notes by Steve Gottlieb