The galaxy pair NGC1888/1889 in Lepus was first discovered by William Herschel in 1785, although he only saw one of the pair, NGC 1888. It took Bindon Stoney using Lord Rosse's 72" in 1851 to discover the smaller galaxy in the pair which became NGC 1889.

Arp catalogued the pair as Arp 123 in his group of "Ellipticals close to and perturbing spirals". NGC 1888 does look as it is being distorted by an encounter with extended spiral arms. The galaxy does have a spiral arm on the opposite side to NGC 1889 which contains lots of young blue stars. Vorontsov-Velyaminov also included it in his extended catalogue of interacting galaxies as VV 1138. The pair also hosted the Type Ia supernova SN 2018yu.

The galaxies lie at a distance of perhaps 110 million light years from us.

Close by and in the same high power field is the edge on galaxy MCG-2-14-15, also known as RFGC 973, which at magnitude 14.5 should be visible in larger telescopes. For those with very large telescopes there is a third edge on galaxy called LEDA 147414 (PGC 147414), but at mag 16.5 this is likely to require very large telescopes from high dark sites to find.

from Webb Deep-Sky Society: Galaxy of the Month: NGC1888