Blogs

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.