On March 18th, 1781 Charles Messier discovered (in his own words), a "nebula without star in Virgo, above the preceding No. 90: its light again fainter than the above". Unfortunately there is no galaxy at the position he published in 1784. Ever since this has been one of the "Missing Messier Objects". There have been a number of suggestions as to the true identify of what he saw that night, and most references now call NGC 4548 "M-91", after amateur astronomer W.C. Williams showed in a letter published in the Dec. 1969 issue of Sky & Tel. how Messier made a mistake. He recorded later objects' positions buy measuring their offset in RA/Dec from a known bright object. In the Virgo area he always used the same galaxy, but in this case, he used another. However, if you apply the offset he recorded to his usual starting point, you come to NGC 4548.

NGC 4548 bottom left in this image is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices. Two different teams using the Hubble Space Telescope estimate its distance to be 48 to 58 million light years. It is therefore a member of the Coma-Virgo Galaxy Cluster. The spiral arms inner parts form an incomplete ring just outside of the bar. Like many barred spirals with small nuclei NGC 4548 has a strong energy source in its center. Many astronomers believe that giant black holes are the energy source in these Active Galactic Nuclei.

M88 Galaxy

M88, upper right in this image is a 10th magnitude spiral galaxy with multiple arms in Coma Berenices. It was discovered by Charles Messier

on March 18, 1781. That was a good day for Messier, because he found eight galaxies and a globular cluster on that same day. It is part of the Virgo-Coma Galaxy Cluster, and is located in a part of the sky filled with relatively bright galaxies. It is considered to be one of the best of the Virgo group of galaxies for an amateur size telescope.M88 is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. The galaxy is 60 million light-years away. M88 has an unusually high red-shift for its distance, as it is receding from us at about 2000 km/sec. However, a type Ia supernova occurred in M88 in 1999, and calculations based upon the brightness of the observations made of that supernova confirmed its distance from us.

This wide field image was taken on the 9th April 2010 with a Canon 40D DSLR and Stellarview 102ED Refractor at f /5.6. 19 seperate 5 minute images @ ISO 800 were captured in Nebulosity, aligned and stacked. Final Levels and Curves in Photoshop.