History

This group of galaxies was discovered on 17 June 1876 by the French astronomer Jean Marie Édouard Stephan. From 1866 to 1907 he was director of the observatory in Marseille and used the 31 inch Foucault reflector. He noted: «Excessively excessively faint; surrounds a very small star; appears to reach 2 other fainter ones.» John L. E. Dreyer added it in 1888 as NGC 6027 to his «New General Catalogue». ^{[277, 313, 568]}

In the late 1940s during an investication of faint galaxies made at the Barnard Observatory of Vanderbilt University the astronomer Carl Seyfert discovered that it was not a single galaxy, but an exceedingly compact group of six galaxies. Walter Baade suspected on the photographs with the 100 and 200 inch telescopes that one apparent member of the sextet was not a galaxy but simply a tidal tail stripped off of one of the other members and that the small spiral due to its abnormal size might not be a true member of the group. ^[569]

In 1959 the Russian astronomer Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov published his «Atlas and Catalogue of Interacting Galaxies». This group of galaxies is referred as VV 115. ^[432]

The British-Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson presented in 1982 his systematic search for groups of galaxies on the photo plates of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) to the public. He counted five members in this group.