Harold Corwin

This is Comet 113/P Spitaler 1890. Bigourdan observed the comet about an hour and a half before returning to the field, apparently to reobserve it. Confusion set in somehow, since Bigourdan's precise offsets for the "nebula" fall within an arcsecond of the position of the comet at the time of his obsevation (thanks to Brian Marsden for computing the comet's position at that time). Since Bigourdan did not collect and assemble his observations of nebulae until years after his actual work at the eyepiece, it is possible that he simply misread his observing logs for the evening.

The incorrect identification of IC 2120 as a planetary (though actually a compact HII region, it is listed as PK 169-00.1) comes from Minkowski (PASP 59, 257, 1947), but his object is 39 arcmin southwest of Bigourdan's position. Why Minkowski chose to call the nebula IC 2120 is not obvious, but it is certainly wrong.

The full story is set out in two short papers in the Quarterly Journal of the Webb Society ("What is IC 2120?" by B. Skiff, H. Corwin, B. Archinal, R. Erdmann, S. Gottlieb, A. Ling, and O. Brazell, No. 104, Page 1, April 1996; and "IC 2120 -- The Final Chapter?" by H. Corwin, B. Skiff, B. Marsden, and G. Williams, No. 105, Page 1, July 1996).

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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

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