juliensimon/messier-catalog

Messier Catalog

The complete Messier catalog — 93 deep-sky objects catalogued by Charles Messier in the 18th century. Includes 25 galaxies, 44 star clusters, and 7 nebulae/remnants.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
messier_id	string	Messier designation (M 1, M 2, ...)
messier_number	int	Messier number (1-110)
name	string	Primary SIMBAD name (e.g. "NGC 224", "Crab Nebula")
ra_deg	float	Right ascension (degrees)
dec_deg	float	Declination (degrees)
object_type	string	SIMBAD object type code
object_category	string	Human-readable category (Galaxy, Globular Cluster, etc.)
major_axis_arcmin	float	Major axis angular size (arcmin)
minor_axis_arcmin	float	Minor axis angular size (arcmin)

Quick stats

• 93 Messier objects
• 25 galaxies, 44 star clusters, 7 nebulae/remnants

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/messier-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Galaxies only
galaxies = df[df["object_category"].str.contains("Galaxy", na=False)]

# Objects by category
df["object_category"].value_counts()

Update frequency

Updated quarterly via GitHub Actions.

Data source

SIMBAD Astronomical Database (CDS, Strasbourg).

Related datasets

• ngc-ic-catalog — 14K deep-sky objects (NGC + IC)
• quasar-catalog — 50K quasars and AGN
• black-hole-catalog — Known black hole systems

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Citation

@dataset{messier_catalog,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Messier Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/messier-catalog},
  note = {Based on SIMBAD astronomical database (CDS Strasbourg)}
}