Harold Corwin

IC 2988 is, if anything at all, a faint star near Bigourdan's position. Though he has two measurements of it on 21 March 1898, they disagree by nearly 20 arcsec in declination, so the identity is not beyond doubt. I do not see any reduction problem with his measurements, just the disagreement between them.

Still, one of his measurements is within a few arcsec of the star, so he probably did see it vaguely. His description is telling, too: "Pretty nebulous, pretty granulated, no other detail seen because of the object's extreme faintness. * 11.5 at PA = 150 deg, d = 2.7 arcmin." The 11.5 magnitude star is where he says it is, so I'll take the identity with the faint star, even though it is fainter than Bigourdan's normal limit.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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