All 110 Messier and 109 Caldwell objects, the full NGC and IC catalogues — about 13,000 galaxies, clusters and nebulae — and some 3,000 named and lettered stars. Each one has a photo, a short description, an honest note on what it looks like through binoculars or a telescope, and when it is up tonight from your place.
Charles Messier published his list of fuzzy objects between 1774 and 1781 so that he and others would not mistake them for comets. With seven entries added later from his notes, it has 110 — the brightest galaxies, clusters and nebulae seen from mid-northern latitudes, and the classic first targets for a small telescope.
Browse MessierPatrick Moore put together the Caldwell catalogue in 1995: 109 bright objects that are not in Messier's list, including southern showpieces never visible from Paris. The numbers run from the far north (C1) to the far south (C109); the name is his own surname, Caldwell-Moore.
Browse CaldwellJ. L. E. Dreyer published the NGC in 1888, gathering mostly the visual discoveries of William, Caroline and John Herschel. Most entries are faint galaxies, but nearly every famous showpiece has an NGC number too — the Andromeda Galaxy is NGC 224.
Browse NGCDreyer's two supplements of 1895 and 1908 added thousands of objects, many found on the first photographic plates of the sky. They include faint, wide nebulae such as IC 434, the glow behind the Horsehead.
Browse ICProper names such as Sirius and Vega, Greek letters from Johann Bayer's atlas of 1603 (α Orionis is Betelgeuse) and Flamsteed numbers such as 61 Cygni. Bayer's letters roughly follow brightness, but not always.
Browse starsLoading the catalog…
Where and when to look from your place tonight, how big and bright each one is now, what binoculars and a telescope show, and its oppositions and conjunctions for the year ahead.
The Sun, planets and their larger moons in their real positions for any date from 3000 BC to AD 3000, with eclipse shadows. Pick a body to fly straight to it.
The Moon's real phase and tilt for your place and time, with official IAU names and the features along the terminator tonight, where shadows show the most relief.
Magnitude measures brightness backwards: the smaller the number, the brighter. From a dark country sky the eye reaches about magnitude 6 for stars; 10×50 binoculars about 9–10; a 6–8-inch telescope about 13–14. Galaxies and nebulae spread their light out, so they look fainter than a star of the same magnitude — the size and surface brightness on each object page say how much.
The counts on the tabs differ a little from the original totals of 7,840 and 5,386: OpenNGC lists some entries as separate components and leaves out duplicates and objects that turned out not to exist.
Up tonight means the object climbs higher than 20° above the horizon at some point while the sky is dark at your place. Low objects shine through more air and look dimmer. The list ignores trees and buildings; to account for them, set up My view and check the object page.
Data: OpenNGC by Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (BSD 3-Clause), HYG star database by David Nash (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photos come from Wikimedia Commons and the DSS2 sky survey via CDS; their credits are on each object page.