NGC Thumbnails

[John S.]

I started this project for my own personal gratification. I personally don't mind that some of the objects are subpar quality. Most of those objects are very interesting to me anyway. However, I would like to make sure that it meets certain quality levels. I am open to input for how to rectify the situation. I believe the limits of the survey itself will limit the outlet quality though. If you want I'll post the links to the two tarballs for the NGC and IC objects and you can download them a try for yourself.

John

> On Apr 15, 2017, at 9:02 AM, Hans <hans at lambermont.dyndns.org> wrote:
> 
> Agreed, this is something very nice to have. And it is tedious work too.  For
> images that don't look too good I expect we'll even get negative remarks, but
> that should not inhibit this project. To me having a skimpy image is far better
> than no image at all.
> 
> Is the idea to have an image library or to dynamically download them on demand ?
> 
> -- Hans
> 
> Jasem Mutlaq wrote on 20170415:
> 
>> I'm attaching a few examples so you can see why we can't use them as is in
>> KStars.
>> 
>>> On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 9:43 AM, Akarsh Simha <akarshsimha at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> This is something very nice to have!
>>> 
>>> A caveat to consider is the licensing for DSS imagery. They are not
>>> available for commercial use, so we must ship this as an add-on through
>>> KNewStuff ("Get New Data")
>>> 
>>> Other sources of images are SDSS, the Hubble Legacy Archive (hla.stsci.edu)
>>> and the recently released PanStarrs 1 survey. I think the PanStarrs 1
>>> survey has a large sky coverage (possibly even all sky -- I haven't
>>> checked). SDSS has a somewhat small footprint, and the Hubble only has
>>> objects of interest.
>>> 
>>> I didn't quite get what the problem involved is. The DSS is made from
>>> digitizing scanned plates mostly from the Palomar Observatory and UKSTU
>>> telescope. The result is that many plates have artefacts, and they are
>>> completely uncalibrated. Planetary nebulae and bright emission nebulae tend
>>> to be overexposed. There is no way around these problems other than going
>>> to other surveys.
>>> 
>>> Regards
>>> Akarsh
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Best Regards,
>> Jasem Mutlaq
> 
> 
> 
> 
>