Request for Information -

Information Request on the Messier Objects

Following is a list of the most urgently required (or wanted) information

on the Messier objects. Although we have usually invested considerable effort

of research, we could not find very well confirmed (or no unique) data and

informations in these cases. If you have any of the requested information, or

some pointer or comment, please notify me.

Good (or at least considerably good) individual distances for the
following galaxies:
- M64 (current value: 12 Mly).
  The current value is very uncertain; more information is urgently
  
  required.
- M74 (current value: 35 Mly)
- M77 (current value: 60 Mly)
- M83 (current value: 10 Mly)
- M94 (current value: 14.5 Mly)
- M104 (current value: 50 Mly)
- M106 (current value: 25 Mly)
- M108 (current value: 45 Mly)
- M109 (current value: 55 Mly)
Many other galaxy distances are also far from being safe or acurate;

any corrctions or pointers to modern references are certainly appreciated.
Data which help to clear the nature of the system or asterism of four stars,
M73
More and more acurate data on the double star M40
“SN” 1986D in M82:
Was it really a SN, or what else ?
Our history section, as well as the “similar catalog” section, would
benefit if someone could provide me with one (or more) of following

historic deepsky catalogs (see our

“History of Deepsky Discovery”

page):
- More information on Flamsteed‘s “several” nebulous objects
- De Cheseaux‘s list of
  20 deepsky objects
- Bode‘s catalog of 75 or
  77 objects
- William Herschel‘s
  first two catalog parts (2000 objects); a copy of the publication of
  
  the last 500 is already at the maintainer
(thanks to Fredi De Maria for

his extensive and generous help with the

Hodierna catalog,

and to Glen Cozens for discussion of the Dunlop Catalog stuff !)
The object Lacaille III.3 was
stated to be a cluster by Vehrenberg, but I was not successful to

identify it yet. Can anyone help ?
A spectrum of M77 showing the Seyfert
emission lines
HRDs or FHDs of some more Messier open and globular clusters, in
particular M92

Last Modification: 25 Jan 1998, 16:20 MET