 IMPORTANT NOTICE! Never use a telescope or spotting scope to look at the Sun! Observing the Sun, even for the shortest fraction of a second, will cause irreversible damage to your eye as well as physical damage to the telescope or spotting scope itself. |
The Magellan 12,218-Object Library is a collection of the most studied and
fantastic objects in the sky. This library consists of the following object
databases:
- 7,840 NGC (New General Catalog) objects*: Complete catalog
- 4,093 IC (Index Catalog) objects*
- 351 stellar objectsbrightest stars and double stars
- 110 Messier objects
- 8 major planets
* NGC 2000 and IC databases are copyrighted by Sky Publishing Corporation
and used with their permission.
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A. NGC
You will notice that the Messier (M) objects, and the NGC objects have been
incorporated into the Meade Instruments CNGC listing. CNGC stands for "Computerized
New General Catalog of Non-Stellar Astronomical Objects." The CNGC
is an enhancement from the RNGC (Revised New General Catalog) in many ways.
Angular sizes are given in arc-seconds on the CNGC listing, and in a convenient
scaled format on the Magellan Display. Magnitudes are given to .1 magnitude
where possible.
The complete CNGC contains 7840 objects, most of which appear in the RNGC
with the same number. More than 400 objects were added to the RNGC to create
the CNGC. Most of these "should have been" in the RNGC in the sense that
they are bright and large enough to have been included. The coordinates
in the CNGC listing are listed for the year 2000.
Objects have been assigned a "Visual Quality Rating", henceforth called
VQ. A large number of VQ's have been obtained by observing the objects. To
make the VQ's as useful as possible, all observations have been made with
the same telescope and eyepiece under substantially identical observing
conditions. Only for very small objects was a higher power eyepiece used.
Your "Visual Quality Rating" of a particular object will vary, largely due
to sky conditions.
All, or very nearly all, of the objects in the CNGC are visible with the
standard instrumentation and observing conditions used to obtain the visual
quality ratings. It is a good indication of what can be expected with similar
equipment by experienced deep-sky observers in excellent sky conditions.
Naturally, smaller telescopes and/or less optimal observing conditions will
lower the apparent quality of all objects.
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B. IC
The Index Catalog (IC) is an extension of the NGC catalog and includes objects
of interest to the amateur astronomer. The excerpted catalog of 4,093 objects
is included.
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C. MESSIER
The Messier Catalog has been the benchmark deep-sky catalog for years. Recently
expanded to 110 objects, the Messier catalog contains most of the best deep-sky
objects.
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D. STAR
The STAR Catalog contains the 250 brightest stars (STAR 1 through STAR 250),
100 interesting double stars (STAR 251 through STAR 350), plus Sigma Octantis,
the southern pole star (STAR 351).
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E. PLANETS
Magellan calculates the orbital positions of the eight major planets for
the current calendar date.
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