QUESTION:
How do you name the nebulas that you find?

ANSWER from Dave Cole on October 30, 1995:
Most of the nebulas we might look at have already been named, or at
least numbered.  The brightest nebulae were first made into a list in
the 18th century by Charles Messier, a French comet-hunter.  He liked
to patrol the night skies looking for new comets, and after a while
noticed that he kept running into the same fuzzy blobs--which look a
lot like comets when they're far away.  So he started making a list so
he could skip over those fuzzballs, and that's the origin of the "M"
objects, like M-57, the Ring Nebula.  In the 19th century amateur
astronomers gave names to almost all of the "M" objects, based on what
they look like.  So we have the Ring Nebula, the Dumbbell Nebula, the
Horsehead Nebula, the Owl Nebula, and so on.  A few nebulae, like the
Orion Nebula, got named after the constellation which contains them.

Of course, no one ever looked at the sky in the infrared before the
1950's, so we don't have any names from a hundred or more years ago.
However, when we discover something today, we're not really allowed to
name it; usually it just gets a number.  This happened to Messier too,
it was the amateur astronomers who got to name all his "M" objects!

Some objects, though, end up naming themselves.  One such object is the
bright infrared source inside M-42 (the Orion Nebula), which we looked
at during our night flights earlier this month.  That source was
discovered in the late 1960's, in the far-infrared by D.  Kleinmann and
Frank Low at the University of Arizona, and in the near-infrared by
Gerry Neugebaur and Eric Becklin at the California Institute of
Technology.  Each pair published their findings, and soon other
astronomers started to call the source either the "Kleinmann-Low
nebula" or the "Becklin-Neugebaur object".  Over time, that got
shortened to the "KL nebula" and the "BN object", and once it was clear
they were really parts of the same thing, the source became "BN-KL".
Recently, I've noticed my advisor (Al Harper) referring to it as
"Binkle"; and you never know, in another 10 years that might be what
everybody calls it!

Dave Cole
University of Chicago, Department of Astronomy