Harold Corwin

IC 1108 = NGC 5882. Both positions are good enough to positively identify this planetary, but several people (Dreyer, Williamina Fleming, Edward Pickering, and Luis Duncker -- whom Fleming and Pickering credit with the discovery of the IC object) missed the identity.

The planetary was first seen by John Herschel and recorded by him in two sweeps. He thought enough of it to sketch it and include it among the few of his nebulae with "figures" at the end of his CGH volume. His diameter estimates ("... = 1.35 seconds [of time, = 14.2 arcsec] by many observations", and "4 arcsec diam.") are not very consistent, but he was clearly impressed by the planetary.

The object was next picked up on an objective prism plate at Arequipa by Duncker, and was announced by Fleming as an emission-line star in AN 3227. In a second paper in AN 3269, she adds a note that "A superposition of a chart and a spectrum plate ... shows that this object is in reality a gaseous nebula."

So, there was plenty of opportunity to identify this with John Herschel's planetary. However, it was apparently not until Andris Lauberts and I stumbled across this while scanning southern Schmidt plates that the identity of the two numbers came to light. The object is called only by its NGC number in Perek and Kohoutek's 1967 catalogue of planetary nebulae, but Andris has it in the ESO list, and I penciled notes in my copy of the NGC and IC. It may be buried in the SGC Notes, too, but I doubt it.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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