John Herschel discovered NGC 1641 = h2656 on 2 Dec 1834 and remarked " pL; p rich; irreg R; p m comp; 5'; stars 11...16". His position is on the southeast side of a scattered group of stars, roughly 10' across.

Pietro Baracchi searched unsuccessfully for this object a couple of times in Dec 1885 using the 48" Melbourne telesocpe. Shapley and Lindsay (S-L 6) give a diameter of only 20" and notes "NGC 1641? irregularly resolved", but this refers to the double system ESO 84-25, which happens to be close to Herschel's position. Clearly, Herschel's description applies to the larger star group and not these galaxies, so the listing in S-L is erroneous. The Hodge-Wright Atlas of the LMC also labels the ESO galaxies as NGC 1641. RNGC classifies this number as an open cluster, but references S-L, and NGC 2000.0 references the RNGC. The identifications were sorted out by Jenni Kay in an email dated Dec 13, 1998.

600/800mm - 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.

Notes by Steve Gottlieb