Tales of Cataloguing

I was bemused to see a recent paper, 2011A&A.,529,99, Cupani G. et al,
"When two become one: an apparent QSO pair turns out to be a single
quasar". The authors found that two objects in the Veron quasar
catalog were in fact just one object, and provided a likely audit
trail for how the error came to be. OK, it was useful for my own
quasar cataloguing, but a 3 page paper for this?

It is just that in the course of cleaning data for my "million
quasars" catalogue, I've found & fixed maybe a hundred bloopers
recorded in Veron and NED. It's just that the early quasars from the
1970's and 1980's are rife with inexactitude, to where imprecision
blurs with error. But I've not considered publishing the fixes beyond
recording the correct information in my catalog.

An interesting topic (well, to some) is the improvements in resolution
from those days to now. Back then, you espied an 18th magnitude
quasar in a 1-degree tile of sky, named it e.g. "0150-535" (z=1.56)
and moved on, knowing that anyone who looked later would recover it
easily enough. Never mind the wag who came along later and
re-discovered it with greater precision as "0147-537" (z=1.568).
There are a number of such objects in the Veron catalog, annotated as
having "approximate positions", which are nominally just placed in the
center of such tiles of sky, because no better position is known. In
the end I became pretty good at finding the right optical object for
these, using the available optical, radio and X-ray data.

But some puzzlements remain. There is one publication which eluded me
entirely, Afanas'ev et al, 1990BSAO,32,51 presenting quasars named
SA68 #110,SA68 #105,SA68 #090,SA68 #094,SA68 #143,SA68 #095,M82
#95,M82 #69,M82 #22,SA57 #216,SA57 #431. My friends, I could not find
these objects at all -- as though the authors made them all up. The
given co-ordinates point to nothing. I searched near and far for
hours -- there was nothing. If anyone knows the whereabouts of these
objects, could they contact me. I have removed them from the "million
quasars" catalog until they are found.

I'll resist boring you with more such stories, but I do requests.

Eric Flesch