In 1930,[2] Harlow Shapley and his colleagues at the Harvard College Observatory started a survey of galaxies in the southern sky, using photographic plates obtained at the 24-inch Bruce telescope at Bloemfontein, South Africa.

He found it particularly interesting because of its "great linear dimension, the numerous population and distinctly elongated form".

Shapley estimated the distance to this cloud to be 14 times that to the Virgo Cluster, from the average diameters of the galaxies.

In recent times, the Shapley Supercluster was named by Somak Raychaudhury,[3] from a survey of galaxies from UK Schmidt Telescope Sky survey plates, using the Automated Plate Measuring Facility (APM) at the University of Cambridge in England.

Around the same time, Roberto Scaramella and co-workers had also noticed the Shapley Supercluster in the Abell catalogue of clusters of galaxies: they had named it the Alpha concentration.