After a few months of inactivity, I've now made a large number of changes to this site.

Here's the list:

I've added Gum nebula and Westerhout radio source catalogs.

There is an image for every nebula in the Sharpless, RCW and Gum catalogs.

There is an article describing the origins of the Sharpless, Gum and RCW catalogs.

I've redone the map to update it to include version 2.7 of the Diaz et. al. cluster database (27 October 2006) and corrected the distances of several of the nebulae (more corrections and additions still to come).

I've improved the page that shows the details for each object so that this page shows the full size object image as well if available - not just a thumbnail as before.

My site stats show that Galaxy Map is getting about 1300 visitors a month. Not a huge audience, but I'm happy with the way it is growing.

I've added the ability to send some of the prettier nebula images as webcards to your friends and colleagues. Please take a look and help spread the word about this site! This uses the great open source WebCards application.

I've discovered the SuperCOSMOS sky survey. For southern hemisphere objects, this provides a higher resolution than DSS-2, plus blue and hydrogen-alpha plates. As a result, I can create much better nebula images and I'm in the process of redoing many of the images on this site to take advantage of this new data. There are several hundred images to do, so this will take a while.

My goal is to create a full set of descriptions and colour images for all the nebulae in the Sharpless and RCW catalogs. So far as I know, this is the first time this has been done and I hope that it will be a useful reference.

I've started to write the book entry on the Gould Belt.

I've finally started work on a glossary. Terms like HII region now should be linked to the glossary the first time they appear on a page.

I've moved most of the text from the front page at http://galaxymap.org to the introduction to the book. There is now a much simplified front page with a random beautiful nebula image.

Since my last blog entry, I've added a RCW catalog gallery to complement the Sharpless catalog gallery. As the DSS-2 blue plates are missing for much of the southern hemisphere, I've just used the red and infrared (green) plates to construct many of the RCW images. This results in a lot of pink/purple nebulae, but is better than no images at all.

I've also added a simpler and more accurate "fantasy" map. The regions shown on this map will become the basis for much of the Our Galactic Region book.

I've uploaded version 1.2 of the galaxy map. This has a lot more detail in the region of the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere, including 124 new molecular clouds and more than 70 new large HII regions - mostly from the RCW catalog.

I've also added a lot more images. There is now an image for each of the 313 objects in the Sharpless catalog, and I've created a specialised gallery for the Sharpless nebulae.

I've uploaded a new version 1.1 of the galaxy map.

The major change has been to go back to using the original OB association distances from Blaha and Humphreys and not use Mel'nik's adjusted distances. Using Mel'nik's adjustments just created too many inconsistencies. They may be correct, but then every object on the map should be adjusted, not just the OB associations.

I've also added about 500 more molecular clouds from several additional catalogs as well as some missing HII regions and the latest version of the Diaz et. al. cluster catalog. There are now 8456 objects on the galaxy map.

I'll update the sources page soon to reflect the changes.

I'm continuing to add HII region images from DSS as I get time. There are about 125 images in the gallery as I write this.

I've been distracted by a move to Leiden this month, so I haven't put in much work on this site (beyond adding a lot of images to the gallery) . But now I'm back at it. I'm compiling a list of missing HII regions to add to the next version of the map.

A rough to do list in no particular order:

• add a glossary
• add more images
• add more molecular clouds
• add distance estimates for infrared clusters, if I can find any
• try to fix problems with label overprinting on map (this one is hard)
• write a better to do list