Harold Corwin

IC 4606 is lost, at least to a fairly cursory search around its nominal position. William H. Finlay found this with the 7-inch refractor at Cape Town, and gave the RA only to a whole minute of time. His description reads in full, "Circle reading. Follows a faint star 4.5 seconds, and is 0.5 arcmin south." There are no nebulae in this area (near the great rho Oph nebulosity; see IC 4591 for more on that) that match this description.

Several minutes west is NGC 6144 at the same declination. If it were not so obvious, and if it had the faint star to the northwest, it would be a candidate for Finlay's object.

I wrote that a few months ago. I've just become aware (June 2004) of a thread on the "amastro" web site that makes the point that there is in fact a star to the west of the center of cluster. Its position is 16 27 08.33, -26 01 19.4 (J2000.0, measured by me on the DSS). This puts it about 5.8 seconds west of the cluster, though its declination is virtually the same. Still, if Finlay's numbers are estimates, they may fit the star and cluster well enough. I've added the IC number, with a query, to the cluster's entry in the position table.

My thanks to Chris Watson and, especially, David Frew for calling the amastro thread to my attention.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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