Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des amas d’Étoiles

Edition

Complete text of the catalogue, pp. 227-269 of the Connoissance des Temps, ou Connoissance des Mouvemens Célestes, pour l’Année bissextile 1784, computed by Edme-Sébastien Jeaurat (Paris, de l’Imprimerie royale, 1781), from the scan of the copy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (MDZ, bsb10538209, digitized by Google), cross-checked against the Gallica scan of the copy of the Observatoire de Paris (ark:/12148/bpt6k6514280n, views 235-277): the heading and preface (p. 227), the table of positions of nos. 1 to 101 on the left-hand pages 228-266, the details of nos. 1 to 103 on the right-hand pages 229-267, and the nebulae sought in vain (pp. 268-269). The prose was built from the OCR of the BSB scan and corrected page by page against the page images, with the OCR of the Gallica scan as a cross-check (every accent on which the two OCRs disagree was looked up on the image); the table was read from the page images, number by number, and compared with the positions and dates of the English translation of Messier’s own copy on messier.seds.org (four rows where they differ, nos. 11, 71, 97 and 101, were checked again: the print is kept). Layout changes: the positions of each object are set at the head of its description, with the positions that M. Méchain gave for some objects under those of M. Messier, instead of on the facing page; the column heads of the table are set once in a key, with the heading of the details column (“N.os des Nébul.”); the headings repeated on each page (“Détails des Nébuleuses & des amas d’Étoiles.” as a section title, set once, and “Les positions sont rapportées ci-contre”, once “ci-après”) are left out, as are running heads, page numbers and signatures; the title lines of p. 227 are in the header. Normalizations: long s set as s; hyphens at line ends rejoined, and the word “instru-mens” split across pp. 239 and 241 joined; the guillemets repeated at the start of each line of a quotation are set once at its start and end; the dates of the table are as printed, with the day alone when the month is that of the row above. Spelling, accents, punctuation and misprints are kept, among them “dtoit” (no. 8), “d étoiles” (p. 227), “étoilés” (no. 83), the double period after the page range of p. 255, and the declination of no. 97 marked A (australe).

Rights

Charles Messier died on 12 April 1817, so his works are in the public domain in France (70 years counted from 1 January 1818). The catalogue was published in 1781, before 1 January 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States.

No image of the scans is reproduced. The BSB digitization is marked with the rights statement NoC-NC 1.0 (no copyright, non-commercial use) in its IIIF manifest; the Gallica scan is a public-domain document of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.