March 4 - Herschel Spots the Orion Nebula

  Posted on March 4, 2022

This is an update of my post published on March 4, 2011:

Back in the good old days of astronomy, when telescopes were fairly new-fangled, and people had only been using them to study the skies for a century or two (merely!), it was soooo much easier to make discoveries!

Now everything is all discovered, and named, and cataloged. There's nothing more to discover. Right?

Absolutely wrong! We are still making larger telescopes, and we are putting some of them into outer space, above our atmosphere, and we are making some that observe different wavelengths of light, and we are arranging some in Very Large Arrays. Plenty of people are making discoveries, including some amateurs and even kids!

Also, we can communicate our discoveries much more quickly—and we can find out if our “new thing” is really an old, already discovered, already cataloged thing. That task wasn't so easy back in William Herschel's time.

William Herschel, a British astronomer, was very careful not to catalog and “name” (that is, give a number label to) anything he observed that had already been named in Messier's famous catalog. However, he messed up a bit on this particular occasion, on March 4, 1774. He gave the nebula the number H III.I – but it had already been named Messier 43, and it had even earlier than that been discovered by Jacques de Mairan. If Herschel had had the internet, with its almost instant communications and powerful search engines, he'd have known about the earlier sightings and labelings!

This is the entire Orion Nebula.
Messier 43 is the small comma-
shaped dab on the left side of
the larger Messier 42.

Here is another photo of Messier 42 & 43,
taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is just Messier 43.

By the way...

Messier's catalog was a list of fuzzy patches of light, as opposed to points of light, as the stars appear to be. Most Messier objects, we now know, are nebulas or galaxies. Do you know the difference?

Nebulas are clouds of gas and dust that lie between the stars. We can only see nebulas that are lit up by stars within (or behind) the gas cloud, or that block light coming from a lit-up nebula.

Above, nebula
Below, galaxy

Galaxies, on the other hand, are huge collections of stars planets and nebulas and other astronomical bodies. Our solar system is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy guy, wrote an article about this nebula.

Also on this date:

Musician and activist Miriam Makeba's birthday  

Henry the Navigator's birthday

March Forth on March Fourth

Vermont Celebrates Statehood

Spanish architect's 45-year-long project

Marching Music Day

Holy Experiment Day

Birthday of inventor Garrett Morgan

National Grammar Day

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• March holidays
• March birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in March

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• April holidays
• April birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in April
  
  

March 4, 2011

Herschel Spots Orion Nebula – 1774

Back in the good old days of astronomy, when telescopes were fairly new-fangled, and people had only been using them to study the skies for a century or two (merely!), it was soooo much easier to make discoveries!

Now everything is all discovered, and named, and cataloged. There's nothing more to discover. Right?

Absolutely wrong! We are still making larger telescopes, and we are putting some of them into outer space, above our atmosphere, and we are making some that observe different wavelengths of light, and we are arranging some in Very Large Arrays. Plenty of people are making discoveries, including some amateurs and even kids!

Also, we can communicate our discoveries much more quickly—and we can find out if our “new thing” is really an old, already discovered, already cataloged thing. That task wasn't so easy back in Herschel's time.

William Herschel, a British astronomer, was very careful not to catalog and “name” (that is, give a number label to) anything he observed that had already been named in Messier's famous catalog. However, he messed up a bit on this particular occasion, on March 4, 1774. He gave the nebula the number H III.I – but it had already been named Messier 43, and it had even earlier than that been discovered by Jacques de Mairan. If Herschel had had the internet, with its almost instant communications and powerful search engines, he'd have known about the earlier sightings and labelings!

This is the entire Orion Nebula. Messier 43 is the small comma-shaped dab on the left side of the larger Messier 42.

By the way...

Messier's catalog was a list of fuzzy patches of light, as opposed to points of light, as the stars appear to be. Most Messier objects, we now know, are nebulas or galaxies. Do you know the difference?

Nebulas are clouds of gas and dust that lie between the stars. We can only see nebulas that are lit up by stars within (or behind) the gas cloud, or that block light coming from a lit-up nebula.

Galaxies are huge collections of stars planets and nebulas and other astronomical bodies. Our solar system is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Check out the latest...

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy guy, has a photo and article about this nebula.

March 13, 2010

Look Up at the Night Sky Day!
AKA Citizen Science Opportunity!

On this date in 607, Halley's comet reached its perihelion (the point when it is closest to the Sun). People feared comets back then, thinking they were messages of doom from the gods.

On this date in 1781, Sir William Herschel accidentally discovered Uranus. When he first spotted it, through his telescope, he thought it was a star. However, each night as he watched, it moved against the backdrop of steady stars, so Herschel thought it was either a planet or a comet. Finally Herschel and other astronomers determined that it was indeed a planet, and Herschel got the honor of naming it.

He named it Georgium Sidus, or “Georgian Planet,” in honor of King George III of England. But astronomers outside of England didn't like the name, and some suggested going back to Roman gods, which were used to name the planets known since ancient times. (Uranus was the god of the sky.)

On this date in 1930, Clyde Thombaugh announced his February 18th discovery of Pluto.

On this date in 1969, Apollo 9 returned to Earth. This was a crucial step to getting men onto the moon, because it was the first manned flight with the Apollo lunar hardware and the first manned flight of the lunar module.

On this date in 1971, an unmanned satellite called Explorer 43 was launched to study the region between Earth's atmosphere and the Moon.

On this date in 1997, many people who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, went outside at night to spot the comet Hale-Bopp. However, they were distracted from their observation goal by a series of lights that immediately got dubbed “UFOs.”

Do you know what a UFO is?

If you guessed that it's an alien spaceship, sorry, you're wrong. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. When people say that they saw a UFO, it just means that they saw something in the night sky and that they are not at all sure what that something was!

In this case, a lot of people claimed that these particular UFOs were alien spacecraft. However, we now know that they weren't alien spaceships. They aren't even UFOs anymore, because they have been positively identified: they were flares dropped from military planes. The flares had little parachutes and took a long time to drop—but they weren't flying, they weren't vehicles, and they certainly weren't vehicles for little green men!

So far in human history, we have never had any alien spaceships visit. (Rats!) Maybe that will happen some day, but it isn't very likely, because stars are REALLY far apart!

On this date in 2010, YOU will go out and look at the night sky. Won't you?

There is a program going on from now until March 16 (which is Tuesday) called the GLOBE at Night program. A lot of people all over the world are needed to go outside, find the constellation Orion, and compare the stars they see with a sky map. Then observers report to the GatN people, who will put together the data and find out how much light pollution there is in different parts of Earth. Even if you live in a big city with lots of lights, and so your night sky is pretty much washed out, the GatN people need your input!

To participate, check out the GLOBE at Night website.

By the way, GatN is a regular program that happens for two weeks in March every year. The past four years, more than 35,000 observations have been made by people from more than 100 different countries!

Learn more about Uranus.

The information is expressed very simply here.
This site is better for older kids; there are three levels of explanations, and the site is in Spanish as well as English!

Take this quiz on Uranus!

1.The planet that Uranus most resembles is _______.

2.Uranus was the first planet discovered with a / an ____.
A. equation B. telescope C. human-made satellite

3. Uranus' weirdest feature is that it _____.
A. is lying on its side. B. has a really long oval-shaped orbit
C. is sometimes further away from the Sun than Neptune

4. True or False - Uranus has rings

5. The intensity of the Sun's light on Uranus is _____ that on Earth.
A. ½ B. ¼ C. 1/10 D. 1/400

ANSWERS: 1.Neptune 2.B 3.A (Uranus probably got smacked by something really big a long time ago and got knocked “onto its side,” because it isn't revolving around the Sun while spinning like a top, like the other planets, but instead it is rolling around the sun like a bowling ball. Choices B and C are both false.) 4.True 5.D