Catalogs for Southerm Skies

[WilliamPaolini]

I am beginning a quest to get more familiar with the southern skies (I'm a north hemispheric - Virginia, USA). Many of the catalogs I use tend to have some coverage of the southern skies, but not sure how well they cover the major sights in your neck of the woods all the way to -70 or more declination (just stuff in reach of an 8" scope so not looking for deep hunts to super faint fuzzies).

Catalogs I typically use are:

Messier
Caldwell
Herschel 400
Cillinder
Stock
Sharpless
Barnard
Melotte
Clark

Searching on web for more southern-centric catalogs I found the Bambury 600 and the Jack Bennett (5") catalog. The Jack Bennett Catalog is covered by the others listed after I did a deeper compare, but the Bambury 600 has about 150 or so objects not listed on any of the others mentioned.

I probably do not have a lot of good coverage for dark nebula as the Barnard is mainly north.

Anyway, if anyone can recommend a few others you use, and provide a link if possible as sometimes hard to find ones that I can get into a spreadsheet easily. All target types are on the table.

Greatly appreciate it!
-Bill

[SamD (Sam)]

The RCW Catalogue extends Sharpless and Gum for southern H-Alpha regions.

This map labels the main H-Alpha regions north and south.

[sutekh (M)]

Bill,

Most of the catalogues that you have named are actually small lists
that are part of larger catalogues: Collinder, Melotte, and Stock
are part of the Budapest OCL (and later, Dias et al.), RCW and
Sharpless are part of Marsalkova (and later, the AGN), etc.

A good summary of the large major DSO catalogues (and links to
them) can be found on the Distro Astro site:

http://www.distroastro.org/catalogs/

The zip format is tar.gz and the line returns are also Linux-style,
so a non-Linux OS will need something like 7-Zip and gEdit to copy
the catalogues to a spreadsheet.

Note that all of these catalogues are already included in Cartes
du Ciel in Distro Astro 3, so you could just download the live DVD
and adjust the magnitude settings to create an atlas of prominent
southern objects. (Even dark nebulae have been assigned "magnitudes"
ending in .99 so that the Cartes du Ciel can display only prominent
objects, if you wish.)

-- sutekh