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This is a list of the brightest natural objects in the sky. This list orders objects by apparent magnitude from Earth , not anywhere else . This list is with reference to naked eye viewing; all objects are listed by their visual magnitudes, and objects too close together to be distinguished are listed jointly.
3C 273 is a quasar located at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo.It was the first quasar ever to be identified and is the visually brightest quasar in the sky as seen from Earth, with an apparent visual magnitude of 12.9. [2]
Messier object. The Messier objects are a set of 110 astronomical objects catalogued by the French astronomer Charles Messier in his Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d'Étoiles (Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters). Because Messier was interested only in finding comets, he created a list of those non-comet objects that frustrated his ...
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, being south of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion, [b] and is known as the middle "star" in the "sword" of Orion. It is one of the brightest nebulae and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky with an apparent magnitude of 4.0.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day. The black hole ...
Charles Messier measured the position of the cluster and included it as "M45" in his catalogue of comet-like objects, published in 1771. Along with the Orion Nebula and the Praesepe cluster, Messier's inclusion of the Pleiades has been noted as curious, as most of Messier's objects were much fainter and more easily confused with comets ...
It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224. Andromeda has a D 25 isophotal diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) [8] and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth. The galaxy's name stems from the area of Earth's sky in which it appears, the constellation ...
Messier 100 (also known as NGC 4321 or the Mirror Galaxy) is a grand design intermediate spiral galaxy in the southern part of the mildly northern Coma Berenices. [5] It is one of the brightest and largest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster and is approximately 55 million light-years [3] from our galaxy, its diameter being 107,000 light years, and being about 60% as large.