Les, John Hershel's position is pretty good, about 0.7' west of the double star, and he is obviously talking about a nebula.
The adjacent object is Nordstroem 238 which is a Compact distant HII region (Caswell, Haynes, 1987);
a HII region (IRAS 08189-3602) (Simpson, Rubin, 1990).
http://www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/DE/Ins/...ext/tab-2.html
The double star in the main nebula is mag 11.9+12.9, distance 2.7" in pa 345.
Information on the cluster is here
http://www.univie.ac.at/webda/cgi-bi...uster=ngc+2579
More notes are here
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...dent=C0819-360