Named asterisms

Roger Curry Sep 13, 2002

Hi, Arild and the group,

That is a neat little asterism and fairly close to one of my favorite
PN's, NGC 6543!

I missed Sue French's article on the Toadstool. Do you have the
location of that one as well?

I agree that a data set for asterisms is very desirable, with a
user-friendly way of adding data to it. I would like to see it display
something akin to constellation lines, perhaps at different width and/or
color than the current constellation lines. Something like a "draw"
feature so you can connect the dots as you see them.

I once found a perfect fishhook somewhere around Canis Major but,
unfortunately, have lost it. I have heard of the "sailboat" but have no
idea where it is. I have a nice "sea lion" asterism consisting of
Spica, the five brightest stars of Corvus, and gamma Hydrae. I'm sure
most experienced observers have their own and I would be interested in
expanding my knowledge of these asterisms.

Clear skies,

Roger

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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 15:34:19 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Arild Moland <arildmi@...>
Subject: Asterism display and tdfs


1) Some of you may have read Sue French's Small Scope Sampler coloumn in
the
October S&T issue. She mention's a fine asterism named the Toadstool.
I've been
writing Sue about my own faviourite asterism, recently named Kemble 2,
which may
be found at 18 35 35.0 and +72 23 56 i Draco. Check it out and tell me
which
constellation it reminds you of :)

Anyway, Sue mentioned that Kemble 2 was labelled as such in her recent
copy of
MegaStar. Now, Guide should really not be any worse off than the
mentioned
package, and hence I became aware of something which is indeed lacking
in
Guide: data for well-known named asterisms.

Imagine someone wanting to find the Coathanger, Kemble's Cascade or the
Toadstool. Guide doesn't have a separate DSO category for asterisms. I'd
very
much like to see one, as well as a fairly comprehensive dataset of named
asterisms. The Coathanger is a border case, since it is actually a
cluster, but
it illustrates the broader issue of being able to find any object by way
of its
nickname, regardless of object type. Indeed, being able to do a
cross-category
search on nicknames is really one thing which would be useful.
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