Harold Corwin

IC 532 apparently does not exist. Bigourdan normally gives detailed observations of the nebulae he observed. However, among those that he discovered, seven (IC 532, 543, 759, 1164, 1206, 4977, and 5303; see the notes for each of the others for details specific to them) were listed only in the two tables in his Appendix VII devoted to his new nebulae; though three of them, IC 759, IC 1164, and IC 4977 (all of which see) are listed in his Appendix VIII, "Complementary Measures".

The "missing" objects also appear, of course, in his separately published lists of new nebulae from which Dreyer extracted them for the NGC and IC's. No differential positions from nearby stars are given for these seven objects in Bigourdan's main tables, so we have only his reduced positions and the published descriptions to go on as we attempt to identify them.

IC 532 = B 152 is especially curious, as it was apparently the only object among this group that Bigourdan recorded twice (23 and 25 March 1887). In addition to the position and date, we have a magnitude ("11?") and the remark "Fausse image?" as well as the IC description, "pB, pL, Epf, bM." The object was not found at Helwan in the 1920's, and I found no trace of it on the PSS while working on SEGC. Was it possibly a comet as was IC 2120? Or was it, as Bigourdan remarked, simply a "false image"?

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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