Herschel encouraged Schroeter's interest in nebulae and sent a copy of his 1785 paper on nebulae to Schroeter, who replied that the paper was so interesting that he immediately sent word of it to BodeJ. E.. See Schroeter to Herschel, 29 August 1785, Royal Astronomical Society Herschel MSS, W.1/13.S.21. On 4 January 1794 Herschel wrote to Schroeter, “I shall be very glad to hear what you say on the subject of my Planetary Nebulae when you come to view them with your 27-feet telescope. They are very curious objects” (Herschel MSS, W.1/1, 198–9).
2.
For a description and plate of Schroeter's 27ft telescope, see his Aphroditographische Fragmente (Helmstedt, 1796), 199–250.
3.
Herschel MSS, W.1/13.S.44. Herschel, however, remained unimpressed by Schroeter's originality, and commented in a personal note (Herschel MSS, W.7/6): “Mr. Schroeter says he cannot consider every Nebula a distant Milky Way. I have already proved the same in my paper on Nebulous Stars and mention the Nebula in Orion among others as an instance. Changes in it have been observed by Mairan, Godin, Fouchy. I have a number of unpublished obs[ervations] on that Nebula.”
4.
The Royal Society has a German text of this paper, two English translations, and eight pencil drawings, evenly divided between the nebulae in Orion and Lyra (Royal Society, Letters and Papers, Decade XI, no. 156). Schroeter's paper, read on 12 February 1801 and on 7 May 1801, was not published in the Philosophical transactions, probably because he had included it in his Beytrage zu den neuesten astronomischen Entdeckungen, Dritter Band, Erste Abtheilung (Göttingen, 1800), 151–74. In what follows, I quote from the second (revised) of the English translations.
5.
Schroeter, “Observations on the accidental changes in the fixed lucid nebulae”, [3]–[4].
