- Saint Petersburg (Wikipedia)
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world’s northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As the former capital of Imperial Russia, and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city.
- Messier 59 (Wikipedia)
Messier 59 or M59, also known as NGC 4621, is an elliptical galaxy in the equatorial constellation of Virgo. It is a member of the Virgo Cluster, with the nearest fellow member 8′ away and around 5 magnitudes fainter. The nearest cluster member of comparable brightness is the lenticular galaxy NGC 4638, which is around 17′ away. It and the angularly nearby elliptical galaxy Messier 60 were both discovered by Johann Gottfried Koehler in April 1779 when observing comet seeming close by. Charles Messier listed both in the Messier Catalogue about three days after Koehler’s discovery.