Harold Corwin

IC 2664 is a double star, confirmed on the print of the original plate. Wolf's position is actually closer to the eastern of the two stars, so that is often taken as the IC object. But the images of the two are blended on the print, so I suspect that both should bear the IC number.

Note, too, that the eastern star has a very large proper motion, +166 mas/yr in RA, and -121 mas/yr in Dec, now carrying it away from the western star. On Wolf's plate, the two stars are almost merged, while on the DSS2 images, the stars are about 22 arcsec apart. The motion can actually be seen by "blinking" the red and blue DSS2 images. In spite of the different scales of the images as seen in DSS1 and DSS2, the motion is even more clearly seen by "blinking" those. The position I've adopted from UCAC4 is for the date of observation, claimed to be exactly 2000.0 in the SIMBAD version of the catalogue. Even if that is merely a nominal epoch, the real one is close enough to it to pretty accurately represent the current position of the star.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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