G'day all,
Some may be aware that for the last year or so my "project" has been to photograph all NGC objects visible to me from my observatory. I have 940+ now but have long struggled with making them available on the internet. The solution I have come up with for now is a PDF document containing the results.
I think the PDF might be very useful to people especially as it grows and the image quality improves (as I replace bad images). It's sequenced on RA then Magnitude so you can look up NGC objects by what's currently visible by RA and then what's brightest and see what the object looks like and how big it is as compared to other objects. I would sure find that useful when doing observing! In fact I looked for a book like that years ago and never found one.
Producing results like this wasn't the aim of the project but is a side effect which has come about.
Info on the project here.
The PDF is
compressed with low image quality so that it is small enough to place on the web. This significantly degrades the image quality and in some rare cases almost obliterates the NGC object but overall I don't think detracts from the likely uses. I can provide a 50mb higher quality PDF on CD or something. The full PDF on the website now is a relatively large 9mb.
The PDF will be updated as I take more photo's. With the weather and moon the way they've been behaving lately, that'll be a little while (hopefully an update each month).
http://www.rogergroom.com/page/project_ngc_download
If you do look at it, let me know what you think, comments on improvements are appreciated also.
I might do a new PDF in the next few days to get rid of some shots which clearly should have been culled before the PDF was created.
I still hope to finish the project in the next 18 months, that's another 3800 objects. (I can't see all 7900 objects/)
Finally, sorry to those people who have PM'd me in the past asking for images to use for SN searching and the like. It's just been too hard to get them out there. While I am still happy to give the RAW images, it's still a bit hard, other than DVD.
Roger.