Hubble time! 🌌 The spiral galaxy Messier 77, also known as the Squid Galaxy, sits 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale). The designation Messier 77 comes from the galaxy’s place in the famous catalogue compiled by the French astronomer Charles Messier. Another French astronomer, Pierre Méchain, discovered the galaxy in 1780. Both Messier and Méchain were comet hunters who catalogued nebulous objects that could be mistaken for comets. Messier, Méchain, and other astronomers of their time mistook the Squid Galaxy for either a spiral nebula or a star cluster. This mischaracterisation isn’t surprising. More than a century would pass between the discovery of the Squid Galaxy and the realisation that the ‘spiral nebulae’ scattered across the sky were not part of our galaxy and were in fact separate galaxies millions of light-years away. The Squid Galaxy’s appearance through a small telescope — an intensely bright centre surrounded by a fuzzy cloud — closely r...