There are comets and there are large comets. Fire certainly broke out in the sky in 1743 and 1744 One of the newest.
As the comet whizzed past Earth toward the sun, the comet was said to be bright enough to be visible in broad daylight, outshining Venus in the evening sky. It has also developed a long and prominent double tail, which is already unusual. Then, when it reached perihelion and revolved around the Sun, the comet’s tail split into six clearly defined rays. In the morning, when the comet’s head was still hidden below the horizon, these six tails were bright and visible, reaching the sky like a “fan” that seemed to come from the sun.
Why the comet made this appearance remains a mystery. There may actually be one or two much wider tails, but there were areas obscured by thick dust. In any case, it was recorded by astronomers all over the world, including in China, where court astronomers claimed that the comet made a crackling sound. It was a very strange crime.
The not-so-great young Catherine spotted the culprit when she traveled to Russia to get married. He was obviously thinking about declaring his future greatness because… of course he did.
Back in France, the young Messier seems to have seen the comet too, and seems to have gone a long way towards guiding him to the future of astronomy, rather than bringing people into the boardroom for what was clearly an amazing career path. Messier managed to get the position of assistant to Joseph Nicolas Deliel, who was the official astronomer of the French Navy (orbital plotting, etc.), and perhaps most importantly, the filthy rich.
Delile had a newly built observatory, and the young Messier settled in quickly. Over the next decade, he made several important discoveries, received senior positions in the government, and received numerous awards and memberships in the scientific community. As you might expect, comets remained a major interest for Messier, and he seemed to be able to get rid of a distant comet well before other astronomers could add their names to the approaching snowball. As early as XV. King Louis also gave Messier a very impressive nickname, which is “ Mongoose Comets,” which, if you want to carve a title on your tombstone, this should be it.
But Messier’s later work with deep-sky objects is best remembered today. Beginning in 1771, Messier began cataloging some of the nebulous patches in the night sky—things we know today as nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters. The first list contained 45 such items. The final list, which included some items from Messier’s footnotes and marginal notes, totaled 110. These are the so-called miserable creatures.
Since then, finding these Messier objects has been a right of passage for astronomers. It’s like climbing the seven peaks in mountaineering. Except they’re much less likely to die in an avalanche.
And… well, it turns out that Messier 13 is a thing known variously as the Hercules Cluster, the Hercules Great Globular Cluster, or the Hercules Globular Cluster. Messier was not the first to discover M13. It belongs to another comet man, Edmund Halley, who encountered it in 1714. But Messier put it in the catalog,
M13 is a group of hundreds of thousands of stars, but it is not a galaxy. In fact, it’s one of many such spots orbiting our good old galaxy, the Milky Way. It is located approximately 22,500 light years from Earth. If you want to find it, look for it where the name suggests – in the constellation Hercules. But bring binoculars. Despite the large number of stars in this group, their apparent magnitude exceeds 11 and are too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
M13 is about 100 times more densely packed with stars than its surrounding regions around Earth. There are only about 135 stars within 50 light years of Earth. It’s interesting to think what a sky the size of a nearby neighbor might be like on a clear night. The stars of M13 are closer than ever, and then a pair will merge into a short-lived blue-white giant.
Something about M13 has made the globular Hercules cluster a recurring theme in science fiction novels. This may be why, in 1974, when SETI staff were looking for a target for a test message at the now-gone-but-not-forgotten Arecibo telescope, they chose M13. A letter here and there that contains basic information about mathematics, then expands on the structure of atoms, then the elements, then DNA, and some basic facts about human life.
If someone is there and has a very good receiver, they will have mail in about 22,450 years.
As with most of the images displayed in this feature, the top image was taken with the small but clever Vespera telescope. And as usual with this feature, some of you will do much better. But maybe not better than that…
Web countdown: “NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, will release the first color images and spectroscopic data for the James Webb Space Telescope during a telecast beginning at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 12. .” And we’re streaming it live.
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