BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Happy Birthday, Messier

The great 18th-century French comet hunter Charles Messier was born on June 26, 1730. His claim to fame was his catalog of nebulous objects. He put it together for astronomers - especially those looking for comets - to distinguish between objects that were in the sky all the time and something new. Today's telescopes resolve the fuzzy objects into genuine nebulae, galaxies and star clusters, but the Messier numbers are still in use.

In the Messier Catalog the first item M1 is now known popularly as the Crab Nebula. 19th-century Irish astronomer Lord Rosse built what was then the biggest telescope in the world - the public called it the Leviathan of Parsonstown. He was the first to be able to resolve the shape of deep sky objects, and he thought M1 looked rather like a crab.

The Hubble Space Telescope image of M1, which is a supernova remnant, is one of its most well known images. The supernova itself was seen by Chinese astronomers in 1054.

Messier himself discovered the nebula that he listed as number 20 in his catalog. In the 19th century, with better telescopes, John Herschel was able to distinguish its three lobes. This is how it got the name Trifid Nebula. With modern telescopes and color filters, it looks quite flower-like.

This is a lovely picture of the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). It's named for the constellation Triangulum where it's located, not because it looks anything like a triangle. It's a spiral galaxy full of star-forming regions.

It's also probably the most distant object that can be seen without binoculars or a telescope, but only in good conditions as a faint fuzzy patch. It's 2.6 million light years away - that's 15 quintillion miles (or 24 quintillion km), 15 followed by 18 zeros!

French astronomer Pierre Méchain discovered this spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus in 1790. It has an active black hole at its center. As clouds of dust and gas spiral inwards into the black hole, they heat up and glow. This heating up is very serious business -- they heat up to temperatures of millions of degrees. This means they release high-energy radiation. M77 is a strong X-ray source.