On 07 Mar 2004 17:06:40 GMT, (Rod Mollise) wrote:

[...]

The Messier Objects are those deep sky objects (nebulae, galaxies, star
clusters) discovered or at least catalogued by Charles Messier (1730-1817). The
original "purpose" of Messier's list, which, depending on who you listen to,
contains between about 100 and 110 objects, was to aid comet hunters. Messier,
a comet hunter himself, wanted to list fuzzy objects that could be mistaken for
comets by those seeking them. Since many of the DSOs Messier put in his
catalogue could not have been mistaken for comets, even with the telescopes of
his age, ...

.... or even with the naked eye. How did M45 (or even M44) get on the
list?

It looks like he was "padding" his list in the M30's to M40's -- lots
of open clusters there.


Nick

--
Nick Theodorakis

nicholas_theodorakis [at] urmc [dot] rochester [dot] edu