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!
M
Object Type:
Magnitude:
Constellation: