[Paddy (Patrick)]

Great idea to focus on the Magellanic Clouds, Alex.

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.

The charts are in the order Key, 1,2 & 3. More to follow soon.