IC 418

NEBULAPlanetary nebula

ILLUSTRATION FROM PLANETARY NEBULA · MAJOR AXIS 0.2′

OVERVIEW

NEBULA

IC 418 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Lepus, shining at apparent magnitude 9.44 (). Other catalogues list it as HD 35914, IRAS 05251-1244 and IRAS F05251-1244, among 7 designations in total. It was discovered in 1891.

WHAT IT IS: Planetary nebula
HOW BIG ON THE SKY: 12
HOW BRIGHT (V)
WHERE TO LOOK: Lepus

OBSERVING

FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see IC 418 for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when IC 418 is worth going out for.

VIEW IN SKY MAP

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE

FIELD 1.08°

Too faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. IC 418 covers 12″ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is a speck in a wide field.

: 48×
: 1.08
: 1.25
: 13.0
SIZE ON THE SKY: 12
FILLS OF THE FIELD: 0% of the width
APPARENT MAGNITUDE (): 9.44 · within reach

IC 418 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 12″ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first. Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.

FIND IT ON THE SKY MAP ↗

APPARENT PLACE

EQUINOX J2026.8

Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.

RIGHT ASCENSION
DECLINATION
GRID TURNED SINCE: 18.3
PROPER MOTION SINCE: none published

Computed for 2026-10-25 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for IC 418, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. The catalogue it came from publishes no error for that position, so nothing here says how far this arithmetic can be trusted — the digits above are as precise as the place they were computed from, and no more. Aberration, parallax and refraction are left out. Aberration swings every position by up to twenty arcseconds over a year; parallax stays under an arcsecond for all but the nearest stars; refraction is nothing overhead and about half a degree at the horizon, where it answers to the air, not the sky. The same figure for any date.

CATALOG DATA

10 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

HOW BRIGHT IT IS

What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.

Apparent magnitude ()
Apparent magnitude ()

WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES

Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.

: 62
Redshift (z)
Major axis: 0.2

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.

Discovered by: Williamina Fleming

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.

Also known as: ZZ Leporis
OpenNGC type code: PN
Wikidata item: Q872204
Wikipedia article: IC 418

ALSO KNOWN AS

7 DESIGNATIONS

HD HD 35914
IC IC 418
IRAS IRAS 05251-1244
IRAS IRAS F05251-1244
PK PK 215-24 1
PN PN G215.2-24.2
TYC TYC 5340-684-1

LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE

3 SERVICES

Each link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.

SIMBADIC 418
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
ADSobject:"IC 418"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
VizieR6″ around 81.8675 -12.6973
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.

CITE THIS PAGE

DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT

SpaceCatalog. IC 418 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ic-418

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_ic-418,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{IC 418}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ic-418},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from OpenNGC.}
}

The values above were taken from OpenNGC — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.

That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: OpenNGC, Mattia Verga (github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Fields derived from it stay under CC BY-SA 4.0.