I. C. 342

A story which Harvard's peripatetic Astronomer Harlow Shapley described as that of "a celestial Harun al-Raschid parading through the heavens in the raiment of a beggar" was related by him last week at a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in Manhattan. Forty years ago a British amateur named Denning spotted a faint blur in the constellation Camelopardus. It was identified as a nebular nucleus, or blob of cosmic matter. This apparently pusillanimous thing was of the twelfth magnitude, far below naked-eye visibility. Astronomers did not bother to name it but set it down by number, I. C. 342, in the Second Index Catalog (1895). With better cameras and telescopes I. C. 342 was found to have faint arms. Then these arms were seen to be tremendously long and spiraling. Later the nebula was revealed as much closer to Earth than at first believed, scarcely 1,000,000 light years away. It was marked now not as a blob, but as an island universe containing a billion or more stars. Finally, at Harvard, the diameter of this star-galaxy was measured at some 10,000 light years, which unveiled it at last as a crown prince of the cosmos, third largest among known spiral nebulae, inferior only to long, loose Messier 33 and the Great Nebula in Andromeda. Because of its nearness Dr. Shapley put it in the local supergalaxy which includes the Milky Way, Messier 33, the Andromeda nebula, the Large and Small Clouds of Magellan.

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