We held the Fitz-Randolph Observatory's first "Messier Marathon" on the night of March 19-20, 2001. The Messier catalog of deep sky objects was compiled by the comet hunter Charles Messier in the 18th ...

nebulas and star clusters in the Messier catalog, a list of objects started by 18th-century French astronomer Charles Messier—and to find them in a single night. In 1758, Messier was looking at ...

Messier's frustration with finding "fuzzy ... Five years later, in 1786, English astronomer William Herschel published his Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. With revisions, his ...

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 comets, ...