Tuesday, July 19, 2016

A Different Kind of Messier Marathon

The D3-Celstial interactive skymap now has a complete set of animated transitions, with zoom, rotation and projection change all going smoothly, as well as a way to automatize them (see documentation at the GitHub repository. To celebrate, here I present the Great Messier Show, showing all 110 Messier objects in order. Or select the ones you want to see with the select-box below. This automatically stops the animation after the current move finishes, so you may have to wait a bit. Stopping/starting can also be done manually with the button on the left. Finally, the checkbox "show object names" is pretty self-explanatory, I think.

Data for each object: Messier designation, NGC designation (if any), proper name (if any), object type, classification - For globular clusters: Shapley–Sawyer classification, open clusters: Trumpler classification, planetary nebulae: Vorontsov-Velyaminov classification, galaxies: Galaxy morphology classification and activity class. Finally apparent visual magnitude and apparent dimensions in arcminutes.

Image sources:
NASA/ESA/STScI (M1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 12, 15, 22, 32, 46, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 89, 94, 102, 106, 110) Public Domain
2MASS (M3, 14, 19, 28, 30, 34, 36, 40, 41, 44, 49, 73, 105, 108, 109) Public Domain
ESO (M4, 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 20, 27, 33, 42, 43, 47, 62, 77, 78, 82, 83, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 107) CC BY 4.0
DSS2/AAO/ROE (M6, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 35, 38, 39, 45, 48, 50, 52, 59, 67, 93, 103) Public Domain
Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona (M13, 29, 37, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 74, 76, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 99, 104) CC BY 3.0
Adam Evans (M31) CC BY 2.0
Astrofotografía (M98) CC BY-SA 2.5

Check out the documentation or fork/download the D3-Celestial source in the GitHub repository.

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