Messier Catalog :
Charles Messier (1730-1817)

Charles Messier devoted much of his life to searching the skies for comets.  While looking through a telescope in August, 1758, he noticed a faint patch of fuzz in the constellation Taurus.  It looked somewhat like a comet but could not be one, he concluded, because it didn’t move differently from the stars.  Nevertheless, Messier marked its position on his star chart so he would not be confused by it again.  The object he had stumbled upon was the Crab Nebula, which became the first in a a list of 45 such “confusing” objects that he published in 1774.*

By 1781 the Messier catalog had grown to 103 entries and it now stands at 110 including one duplicate. It is now two centuries later and all of us backyard observers consider the “M” objects to be the jewels of the night sky.  I have now photographed all of Chuck's List from the end of my driveway, and I have updated almost all of the images with data taken from the observatory in New Mexico: