Harold Corwin

IC 240 is probably a line of four faint stars. The IC position is correctly copied from Bigourdan's second list of novae in Comptes Rendus, but his detailed observations suggest that he applied his estimated offsets to the comparison star with the wrong signs. In that case, the position would be about an arcmin southeast of NGC 996; there is nothing there.

However, this observation is in Bigourdan's list of errata. There we find that the data in the big table is reversed from its true values: "In place of PA = 30 deg, read 210 deg and change the signs of delta RA and delta Dec." When this is done, we can recover the IC position, and find that it falls near the line of stars.

I'm still curious about his description in Comptes Rendus: "Mag. 13.3; 35-40 arcsec." His description in the observation list reads only "eF, only suspected." Where did the size come from? (There are several other such discrepancies among his published novae.) In this case, there is no supplemental observation, so the source of his size estimate remains a mystery.

In any case, it's clear that Bigourdan was not much interested in his "novae," and preferred to spend his time measuring the brighter, well-known nebulae.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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