History

On 12 May 1787 the German-British astronomer William Herschel found an object looking through his 18.7 inch reflecting telescope that he thought was a planetary nebula. He cataloged it as IV 50 and described it as follows: «very bright, round, 4' diameter, almost equally bright, with a faint resolvable margin.» ^[464] His son John cataloged the object in 1864 as GC 4244. The Swedish astronomer Per Magnus Herman Schultz using the 9.6" Steinheil refractor at Uppsala Observatory was probably the first one who identified the object as globular cluster. Dreyer mentioned hin when he added the object in 1888 as globular cluster with the designation NGC 6229. ^{[277, 313]}