History of the Messier Catalog
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Alexa Internet
has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the
Wayback Machine
after an embargo period.
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160430134643/http://messier.seds.org:80/xtra/history/mcathist.html
History of the Messier Catalog
Charles Messier published his
original list
of 103
object entries in the
Connoissance des Temps for 1784
in 1781.
Messier personally added the entry for
M104
to his personal copy of the catalog from his observations, obviously
intending a further revision at that time, about one month after the list
was published.
Messier's friend and colleague, Pierre Méchain, also continued his search
for nebulous objects, evidently with the intention to communicate his
observations to Messier for inclusion in a new revision of the Messier
Catalog. When this revision did not occur, he communicated his observations
of
M104
,
M105
,
M106
and
M107
in a letter of May 6, 1783, to Bernoulli for publication in in the 1786
Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch
. He also reports the "nebulae"
M108
and
M109
,
which Messier had mentioned but not given an own catalog number.
These facts demonstrate that the original author and the main contributor
themselves intended to extend the catalog beyond its original 103 entries;
presumably this may mark the beginning of the attempts to enlarge the
catalog.
M104
was more or less officially
added to the catalog
in 1921 by
Camille Flammarion.
David Nash has found the earliest
popular
discussion of the objects
M105
to
M109
is the article by Owen Gingerich in the September, 1953
Sky and Telescope
, in which he mentions the six "Méchain objects"
(
M104
to
M109
).
Gingerich cites an article by Helen Sawyer Hogg in the RASC Journal, 41, p 265,
(1947) as a reference for the
Jahrbuch
report.
Considering the efforts of Messier and Méchain of 1781 to 1783 as the
beginning of attempts to extend the catalog, 1921 to 1953 may be regarded as
the beginning of general acceptance thereof.
Early references containing extended versions of Messier's catalog include
an early list of 109 Messier objects published in "Olcott's Field Book of
the Skies", 4th ed., revised by R. Newton Mayall and Margaret W. Mayall.
This came out in 1954 and lists 109 Messier objects, though
M104 - M109 are noted as "not in Messier's List" and added by Helen
Sawyer Hogg (M104 - 107) or Owen Gingerich (M108 and M109).
Within the next 15 years the additions became pretty widely accepted;
David Levy, in his "The Sky: A User's Guide", mentions only the modern
110-object catalog and claims to have observed them all between 1962
and 1967. In 1967, Patrick Moore's "Amateur Astronomy" gives the
"original" to 104 but has M105-M109 listed as an addendum. Similarly
Neale E. Howard's "The Telescope Handbook and Star Atlas", also
published in 1967, lists the original 103 but refers to M104 through
M109 in a section devoted to observing the Messiers.
By the late 1970s this convention (modern Messier list of 109 or 110)
was close to universal, showing up in just about every available guide,
including the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Observer's Handbooks
and the Webb Society Deep Sky Observer's Handbook (1981 edition).
Nowadays, the modern list of 110 objects is widely accepted as the standard
Messier Catalog.
This page is widely based on information provided by
David Nash
,
whose help is gratefully acknowledged.
Hartmut Frommert
Christine Kronberg
[contact]
Last Modification: June 3, 2007