Background Information

This website was uploaded on 27 August 2004. It has been tested thoughrougly until 10 September 2004..

10 astrophotographers were contacted to get permission to use their colorful pictures of galaxies on this website. Nine responded - all 9 giving the necessary permission.

Here are all the contributors of images shown at this website with links to their webpages. You are obviously welcome to visit their webpages, since nearly all of them have image galleries containing nebulas and globular clusters as well.

Please note: the images displayed on this website are not necessarily the best examples from these astrophotograhers. The site aims to show images of as many galaxies as possible. So if someone has such an image, it will normally be displayed. Most of these astrophotographers have years of experience, so if you see one/more relatively bad images, it does not mean that these people are 'bad astrophotographers'. It may be one of their first images taken, it may have been deliberately taken under the full moon. or taken at low altitude or poor seeing conditions - just for the sake of experimenting under such conditions. So please do not 'judge' these astrophotographers based on their less stunning images that have been included.

Purpose of this website:

To have black and white, negative (white on black) as well as color / colour images of ALL spiral galaxies larger than 3 minutes of arc for both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Phase 1 is done - the black and white images are ALL on this website (29 August 2004).

1 - To be a planning tool for anyone wanting to take pics of beautiful Spiral Galaxies.

To help you plan/pick a spiral galaxy to photograph, the website has the following features designed to help you:

• Galaxies are sorted by RA - to do your planning by month.

   

• There are pictures of all the spiral galaxies in each constellation, one webpage per constellation. Virgo, has 8 pages to handle its 98 galaxies.

   

• All black and white pictures are at the same scale - to make comparisons very easy.

   

• There is a table containing the angular sizes of all the galaxies on every webpage.

   

The black and white previews are severely compressed to load FAST. This also made it possible to have many previews on one relatively fast downloading webpage. Each black and white image was individually compressed , making sure the compression had little negative impact on image quality.

Each color image was individually compressed as well, making sure even more carefully that the compression had VERY little negative impact on image quality.

This website ONLY has pictures of spiral galaxies larger than 3 minutes of arc.

2 - To be a source of MANY galaxy pictures for those people that just want to admire pictures of beautiful galaxies

Most color images are compressed between 5.3 and 9.8 times. On average you will be able to look at 7 times as many pictures of galaxies on this website per time spend "surfing the web" versus other websites where their images are not compressed. If you stare at a compressed image long enough you might therefore find small lack of detail difference between my compressed image and the larger uncompressed image on the astrophotographer's website.

Some people like the look of negative images of galaxies, so there are negatives of some of the galaxies.

All the webpages are laid out in such a way that people with 14 inch computer monitors can easily browse around.

No elliptical galaxies were included on this website, since they are boring (photographically speaking) and not popular targets anyway.

It is not possible to navigate the spiral galaxies by NGC number, the webpages are only sorted by angular sizes. The technical reference tables at the bottom of the black and white pages are sorted by NGC number.

Other uses for this website:

Hans Goran Lindberg suggested that these pictures could be used to compare against while doing nova and supernova hunting. Does that make it worthwhile to download and add the 700 additional galaxies between 2 and 3 seconds of arc?

B mag - Photographic (blue) magnitude
V mag - Visual magnitude
Surface brightness - (mag/arcmin²)
Size a, b - Larger and smaller angular diameter in minutes of arc ('). If only one value (Size a) is given, this refers to the maximum size.
PA - Position angle in degrees

Type:

• Sab - Spiral galaxy with bright center and tighly wound spiral arms
• Sb - Spiral galaxy with somewhat looser wound spiral arms
• Sc - Spiral galaxy with loosely wound / outspread spiral arms

   

• SBab -Barred spiral galaxy with bright center and tighly wound spiral arms
• SBb - Barred spiral galaxy with somewhat looser wound spiral arms
• SBc - Barred spiral galaxy with loosely wound / outspread spiral arms

Other websites include http://www.webcam-astrophotography.com/ - It contains pictures of the planets and moon taken with a 10 inch Meade LX200 GPS telescope and an unmodified Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000.

The original (raw) black and white pictures were downloaded for each of the 631 galaxies using the interactive interface of the Digital Sky Survey.