-WELCOME TO-

THE ONLINE MESSIER CATALOGUE

  Greetings friends and fellow astronomers,

          I hope you find this arrangement of the Charles Messier catalogue a handy quick-reference guide to your observations of the sky. Feel free to print them out for your personnal use. To print a catalogue page simply click the File option on your browser's toolbar and select Print. As with any serious intellectual endeavor great care has been taken to insure the accuracy of the information. However, should you detect any error, please do not hesitate to email a description of the problem with the correction and your source to truemartian@aol.com . I will make every attempt to verify your source and correct the problem. As always I am open to any suggestions you may have to improve the quality of the catalogue. Please include the word CATALOGUE in the subject field of your correspondence. I have a habit of deleting email from sources I do not recognize unread. 
                                                                                                                                     Clear skies!
                                                                                                                                                   Jason

WHO WAS CHARLES MESSIER?

           Charles Messier was born on June 26, 1730 in France. Messier came to Paris in October of 1751 and was hired by the astronomer Joseph Nicolas Delisle as a draftsman and to record astronomical observations. By 1754 he had become an experienced observer.  Messier pursued his passion of comet hunting for the most part of his astronomical career and was generally considered the leading French astronomer by the year 1762. It was his love of comet hunting that inspired him to create a catalogue of nebulous objects so as not to confuse them with the discovery of a new comet.   The first catalogue was not puplished until after he was admitted to the Academie Royale des Sciences in 1770.  It was then that Messier published "Catalogue des Nebuleuses et des amas d'Etoiles, que l'on decouvre parmi les Etoiles fixes, sur l'horizon de Paris," the first installment of the Messier catalogue. This first list contained only 45 objects but was later supplemented twice to bring a total of 100 objects to the list. Further work revealed M101 through M103. However, a young astronomer at the Marine Observatory, Pierre Francois Andre Mechain, would later observe that M101 had actually been misidentified as M102. Mechain would also go on to contribute M104 through M109. Twenty-first century astronomers have proposed NGC 205 in Andromeda as M110. Charles Messier lived to be 86, his last two years of life spent at home suffering from the effects of stroke. He died on April 12, 1817.  It is interesting to note that todays amateur astronomers have access to telescopes far more powerful than those of the professional astronomers of Messier's time.