startswithabang:Messier’s Final Galaxy, M110“It appeared to me amazing that this
startswithabang: Messier’s Final Galaxy, M110 “It appeared to me amazing that this faint nebula has escaped the astronomers and myself, since the discovery of the great [nebula] by Simon Marius in 1612, because when observing the great [nebula], the small is located in the same field of the telescope. I will give a drawing of that remarkable nebula in the girdle of Andromeda, with the two small [nebulae] which accompany it.” Galaxies may be the most common type of object identified in the Messier catalogue, and considering that there are at least hundreds of billions of them in the Universe, you might think that Milky Way-type galaxies are everywhere. But it’s not Milky Way-types that make up most of the Universe, it’s tiny little dwarf galaxies. It just so happens that we get one of them at the very end of the Messier catalogue! It’s the very last object in the entire catalogue, added only in 1967 despite being discovered by Messier back in 1773, but it’s got a remarkable story all its own. -- source link