Charles Messier was a French
astronomer who lived between the years of 1730 and 1817. Originally he
was one of the first comethunters and recorded nearly all comets that
could be seen during his career. When chasing the comets he often was
confused by nebular objects that obviously wherenīt comets and didnīt
move relatively to the stars.
In order not to
confuse them with comets all the time, between 1758 and 1781 he organized
a catalogue of 103 of these "nebular" objects. The current
Messier catalogue includes 110 objects since 7 more objects that Messier
saw have been included since 1924.
The
"nebular" objects that Messier assembled in a catalogue are
mainly known today as a collection of deep sky objects far away from our
planetary system: open clusters, Globular clusters, emission or
reflection nebulae and planetary nebulae of our milkyway system as well
as galaxies of the local group and external galaxies. Here you can see
all 110 Messier objects on one sight:
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