A small planetary nebula in the constellation Taurus, visible in the southern sky after darkness and before 2 am from my front yard. The February skies were cloudy and hindered by high humidity, poor transparency, and light pollution from neighboring homes. At least there wasn’t any wind or moon light to deal with. This is the best I could do with data collected over four nights using a ZWO UV-IR Cut filter for nights 1 and 2 and Optolong L-Quad Enhance filter for nights 3 and 4.
The perseverance and skills of early astronomers is hard to grasp. William Hershel discovered this small planetary nebula on November 13, 1790, describing it as a "cloudy star" and "a most singular phenomenon" and forcing him to rethink his ideas on the construction of the heavens. Up until this point Herschel was convinced that all nebulae consisted of masses of stars too remote to resolve, but now here was a single star "surrounded with a faintly luminous atmosphere". He concluded: "Our judgement I may venture to say, will be, that the nebulosity about the star is not of a starry nature."
Hershel's notes were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which was recently scanned/digitized and is now available online at:
doi:
10.1098/rstl.1791.0006. The actual reference is:
Herschel, William (February 10, 1791), "On Nebulous Stars, Properly So Called.",
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,
81: 71–88,. The section that is referenced in the above paragraph is found on page 73:
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