Messier

"This is Meta building a safety net for a future where data collection gets a lot messier," he said.

It’s a far messier book than that, but largely, I believe, by design.

Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781.

Messier was interested in comets, so his list was a set of fuzzy objects that might be mistaken for comets.

Some were gaseous, star-forming regions, such as the Orion nebula, or M42 – the 42nd object in Messier’s catalog – while others were star clusters such as the Pleiades, or M45.