Harold Corwin

IC 489 is a star. Spitaler describes it as "A small (not more than 10 arcsec diameter) faint nebula with a stellar nucleus." His single micrometrically- measured position used BD +26 1704 as a comparison. At the time he published the measurement, he had no accurate position for the BD star, so his roughly reduced position is the one that appears in IC1.

A few years later (see "Wiener Annalen XI, 125"), he got a better position for the BD star, so was able to properly reduce his measurement. Dreyer provided a more accurate NPD in the IC2 Notes that leads us directly to the faint star that Spitaler mistook as a nebula.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

Drawings, descriptions, and CCD photos are copyright Andrew Cooper unless otherwise noted, no usage without permission.

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