Thursday, January 26, 2012

Goal for 2012

My goal for 2012 is to locate all 110 Messier objects in the night sky. What is a Messier object? Charles Messier was a French astronomer who sought comets but became frustrated by lots of 'fuzzy' objects that were not comets. He compiled these objects into a list now called Messier Objects. Examples are: Galaxies, Nebula, Globular Clusters.

I have already seen a few of these objects, but the plan is to start with M1 (The Crab Nebula), and move on through the list. I'm not sure at this point if it would be practical to start with the first object on the list and work my way through, because some of the objects may not be visible in the correct order. I assume I will be jumping around a lot.

I will post entries as I start to view them...