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Tuttle was born in 1837. He entered the Harvard College Observatory as an assistant astronomer in 1857 under the directorship of William Cranch Bond. His older brother Charles Wesley Tuttle (1829-1881) was there until 1854. Horace Tuttle used the 4" f /8 Merz comet seeker to sweep the skies for comets and was very successful. He was supported by Asaph Hall who calculated the orbits. He left his position at Harvard in 1862 to join the Civial War for only 9 month. After working for the Navy and joining geographical missions he started observing programs at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington in 1884 (where he met Hall again). He died in August 1923 in Falls Church, VA.
At Harvard Tuttle discovered one object, NGC 6643 (HN 21, see below), with the comet seeker on Sept. 1, 1859. It is published in AN #1337 and later included as #21 in Arthur Auwers' list of new nebulae in William Herschel's Verzeichnisse von Nebelflecken und Sternhaufen, Königsberg 1862. Also George Phillips Bond (director from 1859-1865) published this observation (among others by Coolidge and Safford) in AN #1453 (1863). NGC 6643 (No. 23 in Bond's list) is a galaxy in Draco. Tuttle's second discovery (Apr. 8, 1859) with the 4" turned out to be an existing object: NGC 2655 (No. 12), a galaxy in Camelopardalis, was first found by William Herschel on Sept. 26, 1802. Another discovery is mentioned by Auwers: NGC 1333, a reflection nebula in Perseus, found on February 5, 1859 with the comet seeker. But this object was found a year erlier by Schönfeld (see Auwers #17). HN stands for "Harvard Nebula", given in Pickering, E. C., Detection of Nebulae by Photography, Ann. Harv. Obs. 18, 113-117 (1890).
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