Messier Catalog Explorer

An Introduction to the Messier Catalog

The Messier Catalog was created by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1774. It is a catalog of 110 deep sky objects that precedes the New Galactic Catalog (NGC) that is more widely used today. It's an excellent reference for amateur astronomers as it contains objects that are easily accessible to small telescopes.

This distance by magnitude plot shows us a rough structure of where these objects are found. As we might expect, all of the globular clusters, open clusters, and nebulae that are within our galaxy are quite separate from the galaxies in the catalog. This is important to understand: two objects that appear right next to each other on a star chart or in the sky could in fact be lightyears apart! This is an interesting way to view all the data at once, as opposed to a map of the entire night sky!

Summer Viewing

If you're an aspiring amateur astronomer, a clear summer night is a great place to start. In the Northern Hemisphere, there are a lot of interesting objects that are visible in the summertime, and the warm weather won't have you running inside to warm up. Here's the same plot filtered to summer time, so you can get to know the objects that are visible at this time of year.

The Summer Triangle is a region between the stars Vega, Altair, and Deneb - three of the brightest stars in the summer sky. Several of these objects are within the summer triangle, an excellent place to start with summer viewing.

Very bright objects for binoculars and small telescopes

This is a selection of the data showing low-magnitude objects. This means that they are very bright and are good objects for those just beginning to explore the Messier catalog. They're also very accesible if you are using binoculars or smallre telescopes, or if that pesky full moon is ruining your super-dark-sky viewing opportunities!

Just like the summer plot, we've included this to introduce you to the first few objects you might be interested in finding.

Explore the Messier Catalog!

Use the filters to explore the data - we've put everything in a histogram here to make size, distance, and magnitude distributions easier to understand.