The “Missing” Herschel Objects

In a situation analogous to the saga of the famed “missing” Messier objects (which have now all been accounted for as errors in identification and/or position), there is the case of objects that Herschel discovered and cataloged but which reportedly cannot be found in the sky today! These “disappearances” have mostly involved entries in his Class VIII, which are coarsely scattered clusters of stars – many of which were described as “poor” by him. As such, they can often be difficult to pick out from the stellar background since most open clusters lie along the plane of the Milky Way’s rich stratum of stars.