It was discovered on 23 July 1908, by German astronomer August Kopff at Heidelberg Observatory in southern Germany, and named after Desdemona, character in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.
[3][12] Desdemona is a stony S-type asteroid that orbits the Sun in the middle main-belt at a distance of 2.0–3.2 AU once every 4 years and 2 months (1,525 days).
[12] In 2013, a rotational lightcurve for this asteroid was obtained from photometric observations made by astronomer Anna Marciniak at Poznań Observatory, Poland.
[11] Between 2004 and 2006, three more lightcurves were constructed from photometric observations, but they were all fragmentary and based on results with less than full coverage (U=2-/1+/2-).
[9][a] According to the surveys carried out by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, the Japanese Akari satellite, and NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, the asteroid's surface has an albedo between 0.095 and 0.106.