In the 1770s, French astronomer Charles Messier was a comet hunter, and in his nightly sweeps of the sky he kept being fooled by fuzzy patches that looked tantalizingly like comets but never moved. Frustrated, he compiled a list of these annoyances — things to ignore. Two and a half centuries later, his comet discoveries are forgotten, and his catalogue of distractions is the most famous deep-sky observing list in history: the Crab Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula. Messier worked from Paris, though, and missed plenty of bright southern and far-northern showpieces — which is why this page also draws from Patrick Moore's Caldwell catalogue (his 1995 complement list), the sprawling New General Catalogue, and its Index Catalogue supplements, the working reference astronomers still use to name almost everything else. Above are the brightest of all four, ranked by how high they will climb above Zion tonight.