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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 ...
Simple single page Star Chart for the Messier Objects. SVG format. -- w:Jim Cornmell 11:45, 6 September 2006 (UTC) File usage.
Dark sky image with some objects around Pinwheel Galaxy (M 101). The quarter in the lower right shows the tail of Ursa Major with the stars Mizar, Alcor and Alkaid.. The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101, M101 or NGC 5457) is a face-on, unbarred, and counterclockwise spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years (6.4 megaparsecs) [5] from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.
Constellation. Taurus. See also: Open cluster, List of open clusters. The Pleiades (/ ˈpliː.ədiːz, ˈpleɪ -, ˈplaɪ -/), [8][9] also known as Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is an asterism of an open star cluster containing young B-type stars in the northwest of the constellation Taurus.
Whirlpool Galaxy. The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a (M51a) or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. [6][7][8] It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. [9]
It was discovered on May 3, 1764, [10] and was the first Messier object to be discovered by Charles Messier himself. Messier originally mistook the object for a nebula without stars. This mistake was corrected after the stars were resolved by William Herschel around 1784. [11] Since then, it has become one of the best-studied globular clusters.
Winnecke 4 (also known as Messier 40 or WNC 4) is an optical double star consisting of two unrelated stars in a northerly zone of the sky, Ursa Major. The pair were discovered by Charles Messier in 1764 while he was searching for a nebula that had been reported in the area by Johannes Hevelius .
The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745–46. Both the "Eagle" and the "Star Queen" refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula ...