Harold Corwin

IC 1299, et al. The Reverend Thomas Espin, an avid amateur astronomer active for nearly 50 years beginning in the late 1880's, published a list of 15 new "nebulae" in MNRAS 54, 327, 1894. He provides no-more-than-adequate positions for them (estimated from the BD charts), and his descriptions are generally minimal. Though he does not say so, he presumably swept them up during his searches for double stars.

Taken altogether, his brief notes suggest that several of these are no more than enhancements of the stellar background of the Milky Way. Some are real clusters, and at least one is an asterism. I've written out my usual comments for the questionable objects; these notes are folded into the list in numerical order. See IC 1304, IC 1305, IC 1306, IC 1307, IC 1310, IC 1311, IC 1314, IC 1363, IC 1369, IC 1378, IC 1400, 1402, and IC 1442.

IC 1299 itself is a clump of stars that may or may not be a real cluster (Archinal and Hynes have not included it in their otherwise comprehensive list in "Star Clusters", aside from a brief mention under their text entry for IC 1310). Espin's position is very good in this case, and pins down this group of about a dozen stars scattered across an area of 4 arcmin by 2.5 arcmin.

When I looked at this during my sweep of all the NGC and IC clusters, I put the center just over an arcminute northeast of Espin's place, and made it roughly twice as large as during my first look at the object. It is possible that the "cluster" is twice as large again; if so, it is centered at 19 22 55, +20 44.3 (J2000), and is bi-lobed. This, however, takes the object further east of Espin's place, so I mention it simply as a remote possibility.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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