Starfish & stragglers
was particularly busy for Charles Messier, the famed French comet hunter. Prompted by the discovery of a faint object in Virgo by his interlocutor Pierre Méchain, Messier spent the night of March 18 observing eight new deep sky objects in what we now know as the Virgo Cluster. (The number bumps to nine if you include the lenticular galaxy detected by Méchain on March 4 but drops to six if you discount both Méchain’s discovery and a galaxy previously logged by Johann Elert Bode.) The temperatures in Paris were slightly warmer than typical that week, so we can imagine
