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    • Messier Nebulae

    Metadata Updated: March 13, 2026

    The Messier Catalog of bright, extended objects was compiled by the comet-hunter Charles Messier in the 18th century. It comprised a list of 110 objects which are mostly brighter than 10th magnitude and have angular sizes from 1 to 100 arcminutes. M 102 is now generally considered to be spurious, and the object so named was actually M 101. Hence this electronic version of the Messier Catalog contains only 109 objects. The objects in the Messier Catalog are predominantly star clusters in our Milky Way galaxy, with 29 of them being globular clusters, 27 open clusters; the rest are spiral galaxies (27), elliptical galaxies (11), diffuse and planetary nebulae (10), and miscellaneous objects (5). All of the objects in the Messier Catalog are north of -35 degrees declination. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

    Downloads & Resources

    Dates

    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date March 13, 2026

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from NASA Data.json

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date March 13, 2026
    Publisher High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
    Maintainer
    Identifier ivo://nasa.heasarc/messier
    Data Last Modified 2026-03-09
    Category Astrophysics
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 026:00
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 036f5300-b525-4bca-bdff-a59a4e822d8e
    Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
    Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
    Homepage URL ivo://nasa.heasarc/messier
    License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
    Program Code 026:000
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash 2dcd540c9f5197026112b7bad0c9a0608cf29deb06065486de373fc619292113
    Source Schema Version 1.1

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