On June 26, the man responsible for one of my greatest astronomical confusions was born in 1730. That man was Charles Messier, the son of a well-to-do French family who, like many of us, fell in love with astronomy as a teen. In 1744, Messier was thirteen when the sixth brightest comet in recorded history made a dramatic display. After passing the Sun, this object grew six tails and was temporarily bright enough to be seen during the day. Exactly why the comet had six tails is a bit mysterious (this is not normal behavior), and the young Messier was inspired by this weirdness in the sky to keep looking up.
In 1748, when he was eighteen, he was also given the opportunity to see an annular eclipse of the Sun. From there, it wouldn’t be long before Messier secured a position with the French Navel astronomer Joseph Delisle and was put to work as an observer. Records of the 1752 passage of Mercury in front of the Sun were in fact recorded by him. As part of his work, he was able to discover thirteen different comets which is an amazing accomplishment even today for people not doing automated surveys.
Making this list of discoveries even more amazing is how he did it: Messier was using a 100-millimeter telescope on the roof of the Hotel de Cluny in downtown Paris. While light pollution wasn’t what it is today, it still existed, and it was combined with the air pollution of cook fires, coal fires, and all other manners of things burning.
In that size telescope, most comets would appear as nothing more than an asymmetrical fuzzy blob with the tail making the blob a bit more teardrop-shaped than round. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that look that way that aren’t comets. While seeking out comets, Messier got in the habit of cataloging those fuzzy blobs, noting their positions, and sketching their appearance so he could recognize them the next time they tried to confuse him.
And this is where my greatest astronomical misunderstanding comes into play.
As a nerdy kid without a lot of astronomy television shows to watch or adults to listen to, I did a whole lot of reading on my own. For those of you who don’t know how to spell French names, Messier is spelled just how you would spell messier, as in that object in the sky is messier looking than that other one. When I was in middle school or so, I was given a book of Charles Messier’s more than one hundred objects that might be mistaken for comets, using a 100-mm telescope from downtown Paris in the 1700s. That book’s cover, like Stephen O’Meara’s much more recent book, said in large letters “The Messier Objects”, and it wasn’t until college that I learned this wasn’t actually a catalog of things that looked like a hot mess in the sky but rather a catalog made by a man named Charles Messier.
The objects in the Messier Catalogue, often simply referred to with codes like M45 or M101, are the largest and brightest nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies visible in the northern hemisphere. Most can be seen with binoculars, and a few can even be seen by the unaided eye if you know exactly where to look. This includes the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, which is also M31, and the Orion Nebula, M42.
The best time of year to observe Messier’s entire catalog is mid-March when the nights are reasonably long and the entire catalog crams itself into the nighttime sky between dusk and dawn. This is not to say everything will be good to view: You will have to look at some objects near the horizon where they will look blurrier. Instead of trying to observe everything all at once, I recommend looking at a few each clear night. The Royal Astronomical Society’s Astronomical Calendar has lists of when it is best to observe each. We will be reviewing this book in more detail tomorrow, so come back to learn more about one of the best ways to figure out what to look at each night.
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