Harold Corwin

IC 5383 may be unrecoverable. At least, I can't find it.

Javelle's published position falls on a blank patch of sky two or three arcminutes from the nearest candidate galaxy (later catalogued as number 742 by James Keeler in his list of new, faint, nebulae found on Lick 36-inch plates taken around 1900). Javelle lists his reference star as BD +15 4927, the same star which he used on two nights to measure IC 5381 (for which Javelle's position is correct). The discovery date was 10 November 1893; IC 5381 was found two nights later, and reobserved on the 13th.

Javelle makes a couple of typical errors in his lists: reversing the signs of one or the other (or both) of his measured offsets, and misidentifying his comparison stars. Checking the first possibility led nowhere -- all the resulting positions are in blank fields. The second kind of error seemed likely after looking at the POSS. BD +15 4928 is about 3 arcmin northeast of BD +15 4927, and is very nearly the same magnitude. Again, however, checking all of Javelle's possible offsets from this star turned up nothing except very faint stars (B = 18-19) that he could not have seen. A rather cursory search of the area a couple of degrees around the nominal position also showed no galaxies at the correct offsets from other stars of similar magnitude.

So, the unhappy conclusion for now is "Not found."

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

Drawings, descriptions, and CCD photos are copyright Andrew Cooper unless otherwise noted, no usage without permission.

A complete list of credits and sources can be found on the about page