Charles Messier

The Magellanic Clouds are relatively small, containing roughly ten to the nine stars compared to the galaxy with ten to the eleventh stars, and they lie at a distance of about two hundred thousand light-years.

The nearest large galaxy comparable to the galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, also called M31 because it was the thirty-first entry in a catalog of astronomical objects compiled by the French astronomer Charles Messier in 1781.

Charles Messier.

And it lies at a distance of about two million light-years.

The Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Milky Way system all are part of an aggregation of two dozen or so neighboring galaxies known as the Local Group.

Messier 103 sits between Rookbah and Sagan, the leftmost stars of the W, about 9,400 light-years away, considerably more distant than M52, and with a distinction of its own.

It was the last object Charles Messier personally entered in his catalog.

The final seven Messier objects were added by others after his observations concluded, which makes 103 the end of the line for the man himself, the final entry in an accidental masterpiece.

The cluster contains around 172 member stars in a group about 15 light years across, Young by stellar standards at somewhere between 12 and 25 million years old, and it fits comfortably in binoculars or a modest telescope.

It's time for the second ever Quinn's Ideas Halloween Special.

[eerie music] Though the giant bodies in outer space that we would eventually call galaxies were originally discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in the seventeenth century, Edwin Hubble in 1923 was the first to realize what they actually were.

It turned out that there were actually countless galaxies in our universe, made up of billions upon billions of stars and trillions of planets.

It did not take humans long at all to do what we do best: imagine.

Great dark clouds of dust drifting across the background like cosmic smoke.

Charles Messier cataloged more deep sky objects in Sagittarius than in any other constellation.

which tells you something.

If you've heard amateur astronomers mention the teapot, this is where it lives.

Behind enormous clouds of dust, 27,000 light-years away, lies the center of the Milky Way itself.

The teapot is pointing right at it.

No wonder Charles Messier kept finding things there.

He cataloged more deep sky objects in Sagittarius than in any other constellation.

All right.

So this month's, uh, guide to the Messiers, uh, it's based, uh, again, I think it's, uh, Tony Chichi's 12 months tour of the Messier, which, uh, has been up on SEDS, which is a, a website.

You can go- just go Mes- Messier SEDS, S-E-D-S, and, uh, details out all of the, uh, Messier objects for the year.

Now, and, uh, and, and the order though, Shane, is this order works a little bit better, but some of the orders for some of the months, depending on your latitude, I think, um, you might wanna rearrange the number a little bit.

Mm.

Yeah, that's hard to get any good observing for us, uh, at that time of the year.

Yeah, especially like the galaxies or whatever.

So if you're doing 12 months Messiers north of 50, really much north of about 40 degrees north latitude, probably- Reorder them.