File:Comet Lovejoy - 15706363355.jpg

English: On Dec 31, 2012, about a week after getting my new telescope, I made a resolution for the year 2013 that I would observe all 110 Messier objects. The Messier catalog is a list of celestial faint fuzzies -- galaxies, nebulas, star clusters -- compiled by Charles Messier in the late 1700s. His main interest, actually, was avoiding them; he wanted to discover comets, and these objects were merely false alarms.

I was four days late in compiling my own list: my last M-object was the Southern Pinwheel, M83. By the way, my plan was to "observe" them all, and to maybe even photograph a few of them. What I did not realize was that -- due to the miracle of time exposure, and the technology of stacking frames -- it is in fact much easier to photograph them than to see them live. In the end, I probably photographed about 80 of them, and with my own eyes observed maybe half of them. But by this loose standard, and if you spot me those four days, I did "observe" them all.

I didn't think of it at the time, but there is perhaps a mild irony in the fact that, on the last day of my mission to observe all of Messier's "false alarms", I also observed a spectacular comet.