A Sharp Picture of a Sharpless Object
A while ago, I posted a monochrome image (H-alpha channel) of M16 and another bright, but unknown (to me) hydrogen region. The second object did not appear in my planetarium software and very few images I could find on the internet included it, so I asked people for help in identifying it. I eventually came up with an answer myself: It was Sh2-54, AKA Sharpless 54. More importantly, this led me to the online catalog of Sharpless objects, http://www.sharplesscatalog.com/. Stewart Sharpless was an American astronomer who worked on a number of important projects and with some well known astronomers, including Edwin […]