🔭 ☄️ HOMESCHOOL ASTRONOMY: The Most Beautiful Objects in the Universe

Today is the birthday of a famous French astronomer who cataloged the most beautiful objects in the universe — so he could ignore them.

Charles Messier (1730–1817) was a comet hunter. He spent many hours at his telescope looking for faint fuzzy blobs that were just barely moving against the distant stellar background — the sure sign of a comet that might be on its way toward us. But Messier was often distracted, sometimes for days, by faint fuzzy blobs that turned out to be not moving, and so were not comets.

He decided to compile a catalog of these not-comet objects to prevent himself and others from wasting time on them, and the now-famous Messier Catalog was born.

What Messier compiled, without realizing it, was a catalog of many of the most spectacular astronomical objects in the sky — nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies — objects that were poorly understood from a scientific point of view in his own day. (The nature of galaxies, for example, as independent “island universes,” was not understood until well into the twentieth century, more than a hundred years after Messier’s death.)

You can find a magnificently illustrated modern gallery of almost all the Messier objects at the Hubble Space Telescope’s website:

• ➢ Hubble Space Telescope’s Catalog of Messier Objects (nasa.gov)

And the University of Nottingham in Britain has produced a wonderful set of ten-minute videos that introduce all 110 Messier objects:

If you and your students were to watch your way through this series — two or three a week, say — you’d have the equivalent of an entire course in astronomy. And if you have a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars, you can go out in your backyard and locate some of these beautiful objects yourself.

So, happy birthday, Charles! 🎂 You didn’t become especially famous for your comets. ☄️ But you did become very famous for your not-comets. 🌀

What celestial sights and astronomical apparitions will you and your students be examining in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ All the star-sown sky: Teaching your students the major constellations and the names of the principal stars is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Our recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas both contain charts of the constellations that will help you learn your way around the heavens. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time with your students beneath the starry vault. ✨

❡ Star bright: If you’d like some light and easy homeschool astronomy lessons, download and print a copy of our annual River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us month by month as we make twelve heavenly friends-for-life over the course of the year. 🌟

❡ The starry archipelagoes: For a great weekly astronomical essay, perfect for older homeschoolers, pay a visit to “The Sky This Week” from the U.S. Naval Observatory. These well-written pages usually focus on one or two special astronomical events or phenomena. If you have high school astronomy students, have them read these pages aloud to you each week, or ask them to study them and then narrate a summary back to you. 🌌

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Add your name to our free River Houses mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡