Webb Captures New Image of Sombrero Galaxy

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5. Telescopes don't help much for Messier objects

Messier did use a 4 inch refractor, what we would consider a kid's toy today, but telescopes in that day did not help much with brightness and Messier objects tend to be diffuse and dim. Nearly all of them are visible, if only as smudges, with no telescope at all, and the main reason Messier catalogued them is so that they wouldn't confuse comet hunters, who were looking for new dim fuzzy diffuse objects. Resolving any remote galaxy as a structure like a wheel requires either a fairly large aperture, photographic film for time exposures, or preferably both. Those nebulae which turned out to be actual galaxies were not properly understood until the twentieth century when individual stars in the nearer ones could be resolved, revealing them to be "island universes" much like our own Milky Way.