Messier Catalog Photo Gallery
The photo gallery below is a project to image each of the 110 deep sky objects in the Messier Catalog. Charles Messier was an 18th-century French astronomer whose primary goal was to discover new comets. In the process of his searches using relatively small telescopes, Messier occasionally found comet-like object that were not comets. They appeared to be permanent parts of the night sky (like the stars), but he was unaware of the true nature of most of them. To avoid confusion in future comet searches, Messier compiled a catalog of these non-cometary objects.
Today, we recognize the Messier Catalog to consist of a collection of deep sky objects that all lie far beyond the Solar System. Well over 1/3 of them lie outside our own Milky Way Galaxy. The catalog contains 26 open clusters, 29 globular clusters, 7 diffuse nebulae, 4 planetary nebulae, and 40 galaxies (24 spiral, 8 elliptical, 4 barred, and 4 lenticular). There are several one-of-a-kind objects in the catalog including 1 supernova remnant, 1 Milky Way patch, 1 double star, and 1 asterism.
Click on each thumbnail to see a larger image.
