NGC/IC Project Restoration Effort

===== NGC 1641 may be the clump of stars centered about 4 arcmin northwest of JH's position. He describes his object as a "pL, p rich, irreg R cluster; p m comp M; 5'; stars 11...16." There are only about 15 stars scattered across a 9 arcmin by 6 arcmin area. If this is JH's object, it must look better at the eyepiece than it does on the Sky Survey films or on the DSS. ESO apparently has the same object, as does Brent Archinal in "Star Clusters", though Brent puts the center about 3 arcmin southeast of the mean of mine and ESO's, and makes the diameter only 5 arcmin. The object labeled "N1641" in the Hodge-Wright Atlas is a pair of faint interacting galaxies (ESO 084-IG025) that JH could not have seen. The galaxies were further misclassified as an open cluster, and appeared as number 6 in the Shapley-Lindsay list. They are among the brightest in a group of galaxies coincidentally scattered over the same area as the foreground star cluster.

===== NGC 1641 24" (11/18/12 - Magellan Observatory, Australia): large, scattered group of a dozen mag 10.5 to 13.5 stars and another dozen stars down to mag 15, in roughly a 10' region. No central concentration or rich subgroups, though detached in the field so stands out reasonably well. Still, this is a very poor "cluster" considering its size. Some catalogues have misidentified NGC 1641 with a close pair of galaxies on the east side of the group.