William Herschel’s catalog

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William Herschel’s catalog of Deep Sky objects

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Thanks to Bill Arnett,

William Herschel’s catalog is available online. Bill acknowledges

David Bishop for making it available.

You have the following options:

  • The

    Astronomical League’s selection of 400 Herschel objects, for which the

    AL grants the Herschel Award. This list was compiled by

    Brenda Branchett of Deltona, Florida.

  • The

    full Herschel list of 2500 (actually 2514), which according to David was

    originally compiled by Fr. Lucian J. Kemble (a Franciscan monk then living

    in Cochrane, Canada, now moved to Lumsden, Saskaschewan, Canada), but

    partially lost;

    Richard Hook (astronomer in England)

    helped to restore. The list may still be somewhat buggy, though.

    Moreover, besides these (mostly typing) errors, Herschel’s list is indeed

    considerably less reliable than Messier’s smaller catalog):

    Herschel’s catalog contains 36 duplications, 4 entries belong to two objects

    each, two further are listed twice as it is uncertain which object

    corresponds to them, and 87 objects marked as nonexistent in our lists

    (for whatever reason). Thus it seems that actually 2397 objects belong to

    the total of 2520 entries in our list (some of these objects are still

    multiple stars, or asterism).

  • I have created a Herschel 2500 list sorted by Herschel number, available

    in html (linked to our pages) or as

    plain ascii file.

  • I extracted the “Notes” on Herschel’s catalog of

    David Bishop from Bill’s README

  • Goto Bill Arnett’s

    complete Herschel directory.

More material on Friedrich Wilhelm (William) Herschel:

William Herschel was usually carefully avoiding to number the Messier objects,

in appreciation of Messier’s prior work.

However, he of course numbered the missing

and the additional (i.e., later added)

objects, as he did not look at them as Messier’s “nebulae”. Erroneously, he

also numbered some of the Messier objects though, and in some cases, parts of

Messier objects.

Look at the complete list.

Almost all of Herschel’s objects (even the non-existing, erroneous entries)

have also obtained an NGC number; there are only

four or five exceptions.

William Herschel’s sister Caroline, who assisted him in recording his

observations, did a number of own deepsky discoveries;

look at her list.

As the most renowned astronomer of his time, William Herschel contributed

significantly to most branches of astronomy: Besides searching clusters and

nebulae, he discovered planet Uranus in 1781, two satellites of Uranus, Titania

and Oberon, in 1787, and Saturn’s moons Mimas and Enceladus in 1789, he

investigated the proper motion of stars and derived the peculiar motion of the

solar system toward the direction of constellation Hercules, modelled the

Milky Way galaxy from stellar statistics, and speculated about the nature of

the nebulae, including a discussion of the possibility of external island

universes (galaxies) which had been brought up by Kant. He also contributed to

physics (especially optics) and, e.g., discovered the infrared light.

Thanks to Arild Mikalsen from Norway for contributing some corrections

to this page !


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