In the summer of 1767, from mid May through August, Charles finally got to go on a naval voyage with Alexander-Guy Pingre to the Baltic. They tested naval chronometers built by Le Roy on the ship L'Aurore. During his absence from the observatory, Joseph Jerome de Lalande filled in for him and continued the programs from the rooftop of the Hotel de Cluny.
On the 4 th of March, 1769, he added four objects to his list to complete the First Catalogue of M1-M45. A month later, Messier was accepted into the Royal Academy of Sweden in Stockholm. Four months after that he discovered the Great Comet of 1769 on August 8 th, C/1769 P1 Messier, and this so impressed the King of Prussia that he was made a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in September. The charts for this comet, published in the 1775 Memoires, include M10, M12, M14, M42, and M50. However, M48 does not appear on these charts and if it had later confusion about a positional error may have been avoided.
On June 14 th, 1770, Charles discovered Comet Lexell, D/1770 L1, which has the unusual distinction of not being named for the discoverer, but rather for Anders Lexell who calculated the orbit. This comet was later ejected when it passed too close to Jupiter in 1779. A couple of weeks later, Messier was finally accepted into Académie Royale des Sciences, Paris. In November, he married Marie-Françoise de Vermauchampt, age thirty-seven, whom he had known for fifteen years from observing sessions they shared.
The First Catalogue
He decided in 1771 to present the Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters, which have been discovered between the fixed stars over the horizon of Paris; observed at the Observatory of the Navy, with different instruments (M1-M45) to the Academy of Sciences in February, which they published in 1774 in their Memoires. The catalogue also appears in Lalande’s publication Ephemerides for 1775-84. A few days after presenting this first version of the catalogue, Charles found four more objects (M46-49). Two of these objects, M47 and M48, had mistakes in their positional data and were considered missing until the 20 th Century. Messier spotted the Great Comet of 1771, C/1771 A1, on January 10 th and followed up with his thirteenth sighted comet and seventh original discovery, C/1771 G1 Messier, on April 1 st. The charts for the Great Comet published in 1771 include M1, M35, M37, M45 (the Pleiades), and the Hyades.
Tragedy
On March 23 rd, 1772, Madame Messier died about a week after the birth of their son Antoine-Charles, who also did not survive more than a few days longer than his mother. Charles added M50 to his growing list in the next month, but starting in September he took a three month leave back home in Lorraine. During the year he was also accepted in the Royal Academy of Hungary the Academy of Brussels (Belgium).
A Comet’s Tale
During a comet doomsday panic in 1772, Messier independently sighted on March 26 th with another French astronomer named Montaigne (sighting on March 8 th) the Comet Biela (3D/1772 E1 Montaigne) which had a period of 6 years and 9 months. It was also seen in 1806 (1806 I), and later in 1826 by Captain von Biela on the fifth return since 1772, which was also rumored to be a doomsday year. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel calculated the orbit in 1806 and claimed it was the comet from 1772, although he later retracted his this statement. Joseph Morstadt with von Biela’s data proved Bessel was actually correct in his initial calculations. In 1832, this comet would cross Earth’s orbit and almost started another doomsday panic, but Joseph Johann von Littrow quickly published a pamphlet calming the public. Comet Biela split in 1846, and was gone by 1866 when it failed to return. It became the Bielids (originally the Andromedes) shooting star shower of 1872, with a count of 33,400 in 6 ½ hours over Italy and 7651 over Germay in less than 3 hours. Comet P/2001 J1 (NEAT) shares a nearly common orbit and is speculated to be a surviving fragment or has some other sort of association with Biela. Messier’s charts published in the 1777 Memoires of the original comet have M42 and M50, along with the announcement of the discovery of M50 from 1772.
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