I usually make lists of the brightest objects. This time I selected large objects instead.
This is a list of 261 NGC and IC objects south of declination +50.
They are all visible from Brisbane's latitude and north of there.
I looked at images of all the open clusters brighter than mag 7 and picked 37 of them. I also included NGC 6520 which is mag 7.8.
I picked the 50 largest globular clusters. Some class XII globulars were not included because they are hard to see.
The 45 nebulae were chosen from wikisky.org images and from 35 years of experience. I usually look at all the bright nebulae in the sky first, when I roll out my telescope.
My cut-off mag for planetary nebulae was 12. I picked the 50 largest ones, this list contains the 39 that are south of dec +50.
I have a preference for elongated galaxies. I picked the largest galaxies, then deleted some with low surface brightness. This list contains 89 galaxies to mag 11.3.
There are 73 Messier objects and 11 IC objects in the list.
The LMC and M45 are not in the NGC catalog and not in this list.
William Herschel, James Dunlop and Charles Messier found most of the objects in this list; 87, 38 and 26 DSO respectively. John Herschel and Nicolas Lacaille found 18 and 17 of these 261 objects.
The 19 columns in the colour coded list are:
Catalog & Number, Messier #, Discoverer with year, aperture and type of scope, Object type, Constellation, Visual magnitude, Surface Brightness, Length and Width in arc-minutes, RA in hms, dec in hm.
The list is based on Dr Steinicke's PhD research.
http://www.klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/ngcic_e.htm
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