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in the 1700's a French gentleman by the name of Charles Messier hauled out
his fairly primitive telescope and began searching the sky for
comets. In those days, comets were all the rage, and there was a
great deal of interest in discovering them and plotting their
orbits. What actually happened is that Mr. Messier started seeing
all sorts of things which looked a bit like comets, but actually weren't,
so he started to make a list.
A lot of people think that Messier
observed and catalogued all the objects on his list, but this is not
true. Many other observers of the time became involved, and Messier
in a number of cases simply added to his list the objects which the others
had observed. The total in those days was 103 objects. In fact, a long time later
some additional objects
were added to the list, after further scrutiny of Messier's observing
notes, which makes 110 objects in all for our modern Messier list.
One of the favourite pursuits of
amateur astronomers is to observe and log all the Messier objects, and
this page is intended as a reference list. It enables observers to
check the object and to be sure that what they are observing is indeed
what they thought they were observing. All the images were taken by
us over a period of time. Some of them are of better quality than
others, but generally we have tried to image these objects to appear as
they would if you were observing them visually. It has taken a long
time to complete this page and we hope you find it useful. |
