There are comets, and then there are big comets. It must be the fire that broke out in the sky in 1743 and 1744 One of the newest.
As the comet slid past Earth toward the sun, it was bright enough to be seen in the daytime and outperformed Venus in the night sky. It has also developed a long, well-defined double tail, which is not uncommon. Then, when it reaches perihelion and revolves around the sun, the comet’s tail splits into six clearly defined rays. In the morning, when the comet’s head is still hidden below the horizon, the six tails are bright and visible, reaching the sky as a kind of “fan” that seems to come from the sun.
Why the comet gives this appearance remains a mystery. There might actually have been a tail or two that were much wider, but there were areas that were darkened by thick dust. After all, it was recorded by astronomers around the world, including in China, where court astronomers claimed that the comet made a crackling sound. This is a very strange sin.
Not great young Catherine notices the culprit while traveling to Russia to get married. Apparently he considered everything to proclaim his future prowess because… of course he did.
Back in France, young Messier also seems to have seen the comet, and seems to have come a long way to propel it into the future in astronomy, rather than the idyllic career path of taking people to court. Messier managed to land the position of assistant to Joseph Nicolas Deliel who was an official astronomer of the French Navy (drawing courses, etc.) and perhaps most importantly, a filthy rich man.
Delile had a newly built observatory, and young Messier quickly settled in. Over the next decade, he made a number of important discoveries, received senior government positions as well as a series of awards and membership in the scientific community. As expected, comets remain a subject of particular interest to Messier, and he seems good at getting rid of distant comets before other astronomers can get their names on an oncoming snowball. Even King Louis XV gave Messier a very impressive nickname which is “ Mongoose Comets” which, if you want to have one title engraved on your tombstone, should be the title.
But Messier’s later work with deep celestial objects is most remembered today. Starting in 1771, Messier began cataloging some of the misty spots in the night sky—the things we know today as nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters. The first list includes these 45 items. The final list, which includes a few things drawn from Messier’s footnotes and marginals, totals 110. This came to be known as pathetic creature.
Since then, finding this Messier object has been a privilege for astronomers. Something like climbing the Seven Peaks in mountaineering. Except for the much lower probability of death in an avalanche.
And… well, it turns out that Messier 13 is something known by various names as the Hercules Cluster, Hercules Great Spherical Cluster, or Hercules Spherical Cluster. Messier wasn’t actually the first to invent the M13. This award went to another comet man, Edmund Halley, who met him in 1714. But Messier put him in the catalog,
M13 is a cluster of hundreds of thousands of stars, but it is not a galaxy. In fact, it’s one of many blobs orbiting our good old galaxy, the Milky Way. It is located about 22,500 light years from Earth. If you want to find it, look for its name – in the constellation Hercules. But bring a telescope. Despite the number of stars in this group, their visible size is more than 11, and they are too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
M13 is about 100 times denser with stars than neighboring regions around the Earth. There are only about 135 stars within 50 light -years of Earth. It’s interesting to think about what the sky is like as big as the nearest neighbor on a clear night. The stars on the M13 are quite close to each other than before and then a pair of stars eventually merge into a short-lived blue-white monster.
Something about the M13 has made the spherical Hercules cluster a recurring theme in science fiction novels. This may be why when SETI personnel at the missing Arecibo telescope but did not forget to look for targets for a test message in 1974, they chose M13. Somewhere in between here and there a letter with basic information about mathematics, and then expanding it to describe the structure of atoms, then elements, then DNA, and then some basic facts about human life.
If someone is out there, and they have a very good recipient, they will have the mail in about 22,450 years.
As with most of the images I feature in this feature, the top image was taken with the small but smart Vespera telescope. And as always with this feature, I hope some of you will do much better. But maybe it doesn’t get any better than this…
Web countdown: “NASA, in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, will release the first full color image and spectroscopic data for the James Webb Space Telescope during a televised broadcast beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, July 12.” And we will cover it live.
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