At the time, it was simply catalogued as a nebula or faint fuzzy patch. It wouldn't be until the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s that many such faint fuzzy objects were understood to be self-contained galaxies of stars outside the Milky Way and incredibly distant from us. M81 is a bit too dim to see with the unated eye, but it's visible with binoculars or a small telescope where it appears as a dim patch of light. With a 6-inch telescope you can resolve the galaxy's bright core, and with an 8-inch telescope you can begin to make out the spiral arms.