The Messier catalog, popular with amateur astronomers, was actually just a by-product of comet hunting. The aim was to avoid ...

The Messier catalog of deep sky objects was compiled by the comet hunter Charles Messier in the 18th century as a kind of list of "annoying things in the sky that are not comets", and includes many of ...

Some welcome breaks in the cold lately have made it feel like spring is just around the corner. I was shocked to see a ...

For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in ...

He believed that the nebulae were objects within the Milky Way. Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in comets, so his list was a ...

Inspired by the six-tailed comet of 1744, Charles Messier made a career of hunting comets. Messier's frustration with finding "fuzzy" bodies that weren't comets resulted in his famous list of 103 ...

During this period, he cataloged 10,000 stars and identified 42 nebulae, including Messier 83, which he discovered in 1752 during an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1781, Charles Messier ...

The other large galaxies are the Andromeda Galaxy, and Messier 33 (the 33rd entry in Charles Messier's catalog of fuzzy things in the sky). Also in the Local Group are a couple dozen dwarf galaxies.

The public is invited to a Door Peninsula Astronomical Society (DPAS) meeting on March 11, 7 pm. DPAS Board Member Jim Gallt ...