Harold Corwin

IC 2438 is an asterism of six stars found by Bigourdan in February 1894, and dug out again by him nine years later. It is remarkable among his "novae" in that the position comes only from a setting circle reading. I have not seen this before in his lists.

There is another minor mystery here, too. The position he published in CR in 1896 (copied correctly into the IC) is different than that published later in his big tables. Since the CR position (RA = 08 59 28, NPD = 16 00) is for 1860, and his later position (RA = 09 04 25, Dec = +73 51) for 1900, perhaps he made a mistake in precessing it back to 1860.

Whatever happened, the asterism is unmistakeably clear on the sky, with the actual position being about an arcminute south of his two published ones. There is, by the way, a seventh star about an arcminute south of the six that Bigourdan noted; I apparently included that in my earlier position (HCos). My later position (from DSS) is for the six stars that Bigourdan included in his description: "Small cluster formed of 5-6 stars of magnitude 12.8 and fainter, within a circle of about 1.5 arcmin in diameter."

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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