Dennis Mammana • July 29, 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.
Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at
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About the Author: Dennis Mammana
Dennis Mammana is an internationally recognized astronomy author, lecturer, astrophotographer and science communicator who has spent decades helping people explore and understand the wonders of the night sky through books, articles, photography and public presentations.
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