In 1758 French astronomer Charles Messier was searching for Halley's comet when he came across a nebulous object in the constellation Taurus. At first believing it to be a comet, he soon came to realize that it had no apparent motion and therefore couldn't be a comet. He cataloged the object on September 12, 1758, the first of 110 deep space objects that eventually became known as the Messier catalog.

On July 4, 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a "guest" star, extremely bright, clearly visible in the daytime for 23 days and fading in the night sky for 653 days. This star was a supernova, a massive, old star that collapsed upon itself before exploding with extreme violence, then fading into an expanding cloud of ionized gas and dust. It was this cloud that Charles Messier observed 700 years later, and it is still visible today, though it is one of the most difficult of the 110 Messier objects to observe with amateur telescopes.