Galaxy M64 has not been normal for the past billion years, and neither have our encounters with it. Even its discovery fails to be straightforward, as only in the past decade have we known that it was actually found by English astronomer Edward Pigott. Today, he remains little known despite also discovering the first Cepheid — the variable stars that help astronomers uncover cosmic distances.

Pigott’s discovery of M64 on March 23, 1779, occurred just 12 days before German astronomer Johann Bode found it, and a year before French astronomer Charles Messier independently rediscovered it and added it to his famous catalog as Messier 64. Because Pigott’s discovery remained unknown until it was read before the Royal Society of London in 1781 — more than a year after Messier’s published account (and this fact only came to light in 2002) — most references still credit one of the other two.

We’re excited to announce Astronomy magazine’s new Space and Beyond subscription box - a quarterly adventure, curated with an astronomy-themed collection in every box.Regardless, M64’s odd nature soon became obvious when William Herschel’s superior instruments superseded Pigott’s and Messier’s rudimentary telescopes. Just a few years after discovering Uranus, Herschel compared the enormous black blotch on this galaxy to a “black eye” — a label that caught on and remains in use, making M64 the first and only celestial object named for an injury. Several reference texts list its more attractive name, “Sleeping Beauty Galaxy,” but, unfortunately, no one currently uses it. However it’s labeled, the unique blackness enveloping a huge part of this otherwise normal-looking spiral galaxy is its calling card.

M64 floats in the constellation Coma Berenices, which officially honors the hair of Queen Berenice II of Egypt but actually resembles 12-gauge shotgun pellets. With the advent of the 200-inch Hale Telescope in 1948, astronomers realized the black feature is a huge complex cloud of carbon particles surrounding a bright inner zone, while spectroscopy later revealed odd waves of star formation that jumped from one section of the galaxy to another over time. The newest flurry of star birth only now seems to be reaching the vast dusty region, which should start coming alive with bright blue patches in later epochs.