Harold Corwin

IC 2144 is just where Barnard places it. He notes two 12th magnitude stars nearby. One, "npp 2 arcmin" is on the sky as he claims, but the second star is 1 arcmin north of the galaxy, not south as Barnard claims.

It is difficult to tell on the DSS1 (but not on DSS2), but it looks as though there is a star superposed (it is probably actually involved with the object; see the next paragraph for more). The position I've measured on DSS is for this star, as is the UCAC position I've chosen to represent the object.

There has also been some question about the nature of the object. Takata et al in A&AS 104, 529, 1994 have it in their Table 3, "List of galactic objects with extended image" [sic] as one of 17 objects which "... show spectra of galactic objects in our optical measurements." They point back to Westerhout and Brand (A&AS 80, 149, 1989 where the object is No. 711 = IRAS 05471+2351), who have measured ^12^CO emission from the object with a velocity of 2.0 km/s. This makes it pretty certain that IC 2144 is an HII region in the Milky Way. The Galactic position of 184.87, -1.73 degrees suggests a visual extinction of about 8.7+- magnitudes, so if this were a galaxy, it would be quite a remarkable one to be seen at all.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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