The Messier Objects, All At The Same Scale.

I had an interesting idea a while back. I thought, "Of all the pictures and collections of pictures of the objects in Messier's catalog, I've never seen one that showed them all at the same scale." The posters show them nicely, but you have no way to tell how the object should look in the eyepiece of your 8" SCT or Newtonian or 3" refractor. So, I thought I'd try to put together a series of pictures of each object with some kind of guide marks-a circle representing the field of view of my lowest power eyepiece in my C8 for starters. It may help to get to know a little better what to expect in the eyepiece when viewing these objects. One extremely important thing to keep in mind is that these photographs show a lot more detail than you will see in the eyepiece. For example, the picture of M31 shows the ENTIRE extent of this huge object, while your scope will show only about a third, and your eyepiece will only show a fraction of that. How much of the object you see depends a lot on the aperture of your instrument. I suppose I could make two outlines per picture, showing this phenomenon, but I think it would just clutter the images needlessly. Besides, once you get the idea of the comparative sizes, you should be able to visualize what can and can't be seen, as far as extent. And that's the whole idea behind this page!

At first, I thought I might photograph them all. But I wanted to finish this project before hell actually froze over, so I figured I'd borrow the pictures from the SEDS website and scale them. :-) (Most of the pictures here were borrowed from this site, or links obtained from this site.) I'll include the object number, apparent size, celestial coordinates and visual magnitudes under each object.

Clicking on an object number in the table sends you directly to the object for scale, stats etc. The number after the # sign is the rank, not the object number. For instance, if you click on "M11" in the table, it sends you to the 42nd object, since M11 is the 42nd largest object in the catalog. This number also appears to the left of the scaled image. Or, you can just scan down to the bottom of the page and follow the links to the next batch of images, previous images or back up to the table.

Also, if you click on the photo, you'll see a "full size" picture of the object without the circle, except for the objects that extend past the field of view. These will have the circle on them, to give an idea of the actual extent of the object. Clicking on the object name under the picture will send you to the SEDS site for a description of the object.

Keep in mind that these images may not be exact in scale, just as close as I can make them.

Well, here goes nothin'! Let me know what you think at the email address below or in the guest book..

P.S. Advanced apologies for how long it may take to load this page, but once it does, I'm sure you'll find it worth the wait. Clear skies!

Our Moon, just for scale
32.58'
The circle represents the prime focus field of view of ~42' and shall remain constant throughout this page, regardless of image size. .