William Herschel discovered NGC 3662 = H IV-4 = h879 on 22 Feb 1784 (sweep 153) and recorded "an excessively faint nebula, consisting of a nucleus with a vF, S, brush sp. The brush is not regularly fan shapes." Herschel commented in his 1814 PT paper that "a very small star has an extremely faint and very small nebula attached to it in the shape of a puff.". He gave this example as evidence of a union of attraction between the nebula and the star. JH called this object a "star 13-14 m with a F, S, nebulous brush."

Wolfgang Steinicke, in "Observing and Cataloguing Nebulae and Star Clusters" states Julius Schmidt found NGC 3662 on 29 Mar 1862 with a 15.7-cm refractor and described an "exceedingly faint, object with slight central condensation." There was a controversy involving a number of observers whether this was a "variable nebula" (like NGC 1555) as either this galaxy or a nearby star appeared in the BD catalogue (BD -1° 2436) and marked as a nebula. Involved in the controversy were Julius Schmidt, d'Arrest, Hermann Goldschmidt, C.H.F. Peters and Argelander. The end result is that Argelander found a mistake occurred in the BD entry and the star should not have been marked as nebulous.

400/500mm - 17.5" (5/4/02): fairly faint, fairly small, elongated 4:3 ~SSW-NNE, 1.0'x0.7'. There is a fairly bright star ~mag 13.5 which is superimposed about 10" NE from the geometric center and appears similar to a bright stellar nucleus.

Notes by Steve Gottlieb