Week of Aug. 2-8, 2026

One of the most profound experiences a stargazer can have is to stand under the Milky Way on a clear August night far from city lights and see the wispy bunches of stars so tightly packed that they appear to the eye as a hazy band of light punctuated not only by bright individual stars but by tiny regions that appear as hazy clumps.

Aim binoculars or a small telescope toward these "faint fuzzies," as astronomers affectionately call them, and you'll walk the same celestial path as Charles Messier did two and a half centuries ago.

Messier was an 18th-century French astronomer who scanned the heavens in search of new comets, hoping that such discoveries would lead him to fame and fortune. He knew that comets often first appear as faint and colorless smudges of light that drift slowly among the stars, so that's what he was seeking.

Along the way, however, he encountered dozens of such smudges that did not move. What these were he didn't know and, quite frankly, he didn't care. They weren't comets, so to avoid wasting more of his time on them — and to prevent other comet hunters from being similarly fooled — he began to compile a list of all these false comets he encountered on his nightly watch.

This list has made Messier known to every stargazer around the world, since it contains more than a hundred of the most stunning sights in the heavens: star clusters, nebulae, galaxies and more. Considering that Messier used a telescope only four inches across for all these discoveries, every one is within range of today's beginner scopes, and many to binoculars. Even the unaided eye will turn up a few, but you must be under a very dark sky for this to work.

One of the richest areas to find Messier objects, as we call them today, lies in the southern half of our August early evening sky. Here, among the stars of Scorpius, the scorpion and the teapot of Sagittarius, where the Milky Way appears its widest and most brilliant, you can find a true mother lode of cosmic showpieces.

Many of the faint fuzzies in this area are star clusters, families of dozens, hundreds or thousands of stars held together by gravitation. Some of the best are M11 (the 11th entry in Messier's Catalogue), M6, M7 and M22. Others might be wispy clouds of gas and dust; M8, M16 and M20 are among the most spectacular of these diffuse nebulae where stars and planetary systems are continually being born.

Over his life, Messier discovered 13 comets, enough to be called by King Louis XV the "comet ferret." Yet these never brought him the fame or fortune he sought. Instead, it was his inventory of nuisance objects for which he is known worldwide.

Spending a night scanning binoculars or a small telescope along the Milky Way will turn up even more. It's really something special to encounter these amazing objects among the starry sky. You may even wonder, as I often do, if Messier would have been so bothered by finding them had he known what he was actually seeing.

Many astronomical objects cataloged by French astronomer Charles Messier are visible in the southern half of the early evening sky in August.

Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Many astronomical objects cataloged by French astronomer Charles Messier are visible in the southern half of the early evening sky in August.