Globular Cluster hunting -- in Barnard's Galaxy!

[Steve Gottlieb]

Is IC 1308 real? Megastar has it as unknown so perhaps that is why it is not in SkyTools. I do note that there is nothing about it in Harold Corwins IC notes so perhaps it is real and there as a propagated error in the charting programs, not unheard of.

All of the other stuff would be too deep for SkyTools. Greg and I have had discussions over this stuff and he feels that in most cases it is too specialised for his target audience. They can of course be added via the supplementary database.


Owen

IC 1308 = Hubble X is certainly real, despite not being recognized by Megastar. In fact, the original IC position lands right on top of the HII region and Hubble's seminal 1925 paper on NGC 6822, mentions his nebula X is identical to IC 1308. But more recently Paul Hodge's 1988 paper "The HII regions of NGC 6822" (PASP, 100, 917-934) failed to label Hubble X as IC 1308.

There's an interesting story behind this number. Francis Leavenworth, an astronomer at the Leander McCormick Observatory in Virginia, discovered this object on 18 Jun 1887 using their 26-inch Clark refractor. Because of the small field of view in the large refractor, Leavenworth missed seeing the entire galaxy but he picked up the two bright HII regions at the north end of the galaxy instead. But he mistakenly assumed the small HII now called Hubble V was actually Barnard's Galaxy, so he only claimed one new discovery! If it wasn't for this mistake, both of these (relatively) prominent HII regions would have IC designations.


Personal rant: In general, Megastar did a poor job on the identification of the fainter IC objects as it wasn't based on the NGC/IC Project (neither is SkyTools, I believe). In several hundred cases, perfectly good IC objects weren't recognized or Larry Mitchell assigned MAC designations. A few examples are IC 15, 28, 36, 47, 88, etc. If you look up these numbers in Megastar, you'll see what I mean. The reason this probably occurred is these faint IC galaxies were missing in the original PGC, so Larry assumed they were uncatalogued. In fact, even today LEDA fails to recognize many IC designations! For example, PGC 1175571 = IC 88, though Larry assigned it a MAC designation and HyperLEDA doesn't know about the IC number!