Andrew Cooper
Dec 27, 2002    Sentinel, AZ (map)
46cm f/4.5 Deep Violet

Large, bright, sparse, much less dense than NGC663 but otherwise very similar in size and magnitude, 40-50 stars in a circular area, a single bright star to the center

Harold Corwin

IC 1824 is also NGC 1027, a cluster in the Milky Way. The IC object is one of many objects that Barnard apparently sent notes about directly to Dreyer, so we have only the IC entry to lead us. There, Barnard's description reads "Cl, sts F, perh[aps] F neby p extends to it." There is indeed faint nebulosity west of the cluster (extending to IC 1805 about 1.2 degrees west). With nothing at Barnard's nominal position except scattered field stars, NGC 1027 is the only logical choice. Its stars, however, are not "faint," especially taking the superposed SAO 12402 (HD 16626) into account. Barnard has the identity with Herschel's cluster noted in his Milky Way Atlas (see it online at http://www.library.gatech.edu/barnard/).

Brian Skiff, by the way, has chosen the position of the superposed HD star as that for the cluster, but I have adopted Tom DeMary's. That is 10 seconds of time on east from the HD star, but better represents the center of this scattered object.

I should note that while Barnard lists the identity of the cluster in his Milky Way Atlas, he only mentions the cluster peripherally, with no cross-ID, in his 1913 collection of Milky Way and comet photos (Lick Publication XI). He had apparently not yet gone through IC2, though the RAS had distributed it by 1910. See IC 1805 where I have Barnard's comment from Lick XI in full. By the way, Barnard does not mention NGC 1027 in Lick XI, only in his later Milky Way Atlas.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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