| Description | Discovered by William Herschel in 1785, this is one of my favorite Caldwell objects. It's almost perfectly edge-on, with a distinct, central bulge. That said, I miss the wacky unpredictability of the Messier Catalog, where you can be looking at one of the most astonishingly beautiful galaxies in creation, and then switch to a truly dumb little cluster on the next. That's an accident of its ancient origins in the mid-18th century when Messier or Méchain often could see nothing more than a barely perceptible smudge through their telescopes that were little better optically than today's entry level, kid's telescopes. The truth is, they had no idea what their objects really looked like. Patrick Caldwell Moore was an avid amateur, a journalist and an educator, who decided in the 1980s to pick the next 109 favorite objects (a conscious homage to Messier, whose catalog hadn't yet been expanded to 110). He had the advantage of 100 years of astrophotography, given him a very good idea what each target looked like. I've now learned that his choices are sometimes subtle, but never "dumb". |
