Although additional surveys with large Schmidt telescopes continue to yield small catches of additional planetaries (Kohoutek) one cannot escape the conclusion that most planetaries available to existing equipment have been detected. Much remains to be done with powerful Schmidt equipment in the southern hemisphere, especially in the Magellanic Clouds. A vast body of photometric and spectroscopic observation needs to be garnered for the numerous faint nebulae so far discovered.

Spectroscopic and spectrophotometric studies have been carried out for most bright planetaries (λ < 5800) but much remains to be done in the red and near infrared. Important advances have been made in the far infrared (~10μ) (Gillett, Low, Stein, Woolf) where a number of planetaries seem to show abnormally strong continua. This abnormally intense radiation has been attributed to non-thermal emission, effects of many faint lines, and to thermal emission by dust grains (Krishna Swamy, O’Dell) with perhaps the bulk of the evidence favoring the last-mentioned hypothesis. An increasing number of radio observations from 9·5 mm to 73 cm (Thompson, Colvin, Stanley, LeMarne, Kaftan-Kassim, Babieri and Ficarra, Terzian, L. Aller and Milne, Hughes) all indicate that planetaries are thermal sources.