Around 1770 Messier started to publish catalogs of the objects he had found with his telescope. Other astronomers later added to the forty-five objects originally listed in the Messier Catalog, as it became known. The modern version of the Messier Catalog contains 110 objects, many of which are the most beautiful and interesting astronomical objects in the night sky.

The German-English astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) and her nephew John Herschel (1792–1871) created the New General Catalog (NGC), a list of thousands of astronomical objects that represent most of the best-known gaseous nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies in the night sky.