The Persian astronomer Al Sufi was the first man to record seeing the Andromeda galaxy. He called the galaxy 'a small cloud' in his book, the "Book of Fixed Stars", which was published in 964 AD. The first person to look at the galaxy with a telescope was Simon Marius in 1612. In 1764 Charles Messier put it into his catalogue of astronomical objects. He called it M31 and gave the credit for its discovery to Marius, as he did not know that Al Sufi had seen it hundreds of years previously.