As the November Observing Challenge includes the Magellanic Clouds, posting this request seems timely.
With a computer literate friend in Melbourne, I am in the process of developing a web site devoted to the Magellanic Clouds. The idea is to have charts to help people find their way through the abundance of DSO these galaxies have to offer, images related to the objects, sketches, observing reports and links to scientific articles related to the Clouds and their DSOs.
I am at present doing the charts for the SMC using modified Sloane DSS images downloaded through Wikisky (the LMC is going to take quite some time). I convert the images to greyscale and simplify them by adjusting contrast and brightness. Iam labelling them having identified objects using Mati Morel's excellent "Visual Atlas of the Small Magellanic Cloud", Wikisky and Brent Archinal and Steven Hynes' "Star Clusters".
I am posting 3 charts and an interim Key chart (the one on the web site will be much better and use an image from a talented IIS imager instead of the ordinary DSS offering used here) and I will add a few more over the coming days as I get them done. I would be very grateful if a few folk could print them off and see how they go finding objects with them. Any suggestions for improving them would be most appreciated. The images on the site will be a bit different as I anticipate that the labels will also be links to information, notes, articles and images. I am setting them up to be printed on A4 pages.
NGC items just have the number. L stands for Lindsay, K for Kron and N for Henize Nebula catalogue. I suspect that scopes less than 10" or in light polluted areas may not show some of these. I'd be very interested to hear what people can find with different observing conditions.
North is up as this is the way it will be when the clouds are highest in the sky. I hope to have inverted viewing friendly version on the site. Eventually. Each chart is about 75' north to south.
As I said, I'd very much appreciate people playing with these and letting me know how you go.
Some of these charts have already been posted in the observing challenge thread, but I have improved them slightly and so re-posted them
Brilliant job Paddy, my hat goes off to you for putting in this effort that will greatly aid all visual observers. I'll be using these to navigate thru the clouds, and will make a nice reference to compare sketches to aswell! Eagerly awaiting your site mate
Awesome thanks so much Paddy.I was Scanning the Magellanic clouds with my scope and being able to see knots of nebulosity and not knowing whereabouts in the smc i was looking.
This will be of great assistance to all.Good on you.
Here are charts 8 & 9 and an updated key chart. I think I've got it covered. There may be a few labels yet for some of the HW clusters, but otherwise I think it's fairly good for observable objects.
Please let me know if you have any ideas for improving the charts or if there are any problems or errors.
Thanks David and Alex. And thanks to Sab for putting me on to Wikisky which has made the process so much easier than I thought. And Archinal and Hynes has turned out to be a goldmine for working out what some of the various fuzzies on the DSS images have been.
I just tried printing the key chart and with so much dark on it, it came out as a rather sodden sheet that would be of no use under a red light. So here is an inverted greyscale version that might be more useful. Alas some of the lines don't join up so well and this shows up more on the greyscale version. But it will do the job and look a lot nicer on the web site when it's up and running
The charts will be a great help to us.
