August 2010, Kidderminster UK.

This page was last amended on 1st August, 2010.

“Messier” in this context doesn’t mean “more messy”!

It’s the name of a French astronomer (pronounced “mess-ee-ay”) working in the late 1770’s.  He was a comet hunter and was annoyed by constantly finding objects that resembled, but weren’t actually, comets. He started to put a list of them together so that he wouldn’t be fooled by them a second time.  We now know that these objects are nebulae, star clusters, galaxies, etc. and are much loved by amateur astronomers.  You have to be quite skilled to know exactly what you’re looking at but what follows should at least point you in the right direction so that you might spot some of them with binoculars.

Look low in the sky due S at 22:00 UT in the middle of the month, near the constellation Sagittarius.  There is a whole cluster of Messier Objects slightly to the W and above Sagittarius.  The easy-to-spot Messier objects in the area are M22 (a “globular cluster” – a large number of stars roughly together in a ball or globe shape, and among the oldest objects in the Universe), M23 (an “open cluster” of about 120 stars – again a number of stars but this time in no particular shape), M24 (see below) and M25, (open cluster).

M24 is a particularly attractive object, and simple binoculars will bring out the innumerable stars that make up the cluster. If you do find it, look at it steadily for some time as many of the cluster's stars become visible only when the eye has accustomed itself to that particular field of view.