Harold Corwin

IC 1486 = NGC 7648. There is no problem with the NGC position of this, nor with the IC position, at least to within the usual errors of the sources. Bigourdan, in fact, found the identity before he prepared his big table for publication, so there he has Big. 241 = NGC 7648. Since he does not comment about it, I suspect that he simply overlooked the NGC entry until after he had reduced his data, and reported the IC object as a "nova".

The galaxy itself is Markarian 531, apparently with an eccentric, bright blue nucleus. The lens and arms are distorted, so this may be the result of a merger, but I don't find any papers that discuss this galaxy specifically, so that is a pretty wild guess.

In any case, the accurate positions fall into two moderately well-defined bins: the blue nucleus is southwest of the center of the lens. For the galaxy itself, I've simply taken a mean of the two positions.

Check the SDSS or Pan-STARRS images for a close view of this peculiar central region. It seems possible to me, perhaps even probable, that the red nucleus is the true center of the galaxy. We need a high-resolution study of this thing!

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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