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Winter Messier Program Robert Bruce Thompson's Winter Messier Objects Program Presentation Sunday, 20 January 2002 21:00

On 16 January, 2002, I presented a program to the Forsyth Astronomical Society entitled Bagging the Winter Messier Objects. The full text and images from that presentation are available here. Although this material is Copyright © 2002 by Robert Bruce Thompson, I hereby grant to any astronomy club or similar not-for-profit organization non-exclusive permission to use and modify this material for a club presentation, seminar, or other similar purpose. I would appreciate you letting me know if you do use this material by emailing me at thompson@ttgnet.com.

Bagging the Winter Messier Objects

• Introduction
• The First Group
  • M31, M32, M110 (The Andromeda Group of galaxies)
  • M33 (galaxy in Triangulum)
  • M52 (open cluster in Cassiopeia)
  • M103 (open cluster in Cassiopeia)
  • Perseus Overview
    • M34 (open cluster in Perseus)
    • M76 (planetary nebula in Perseus)
• The Second Group
  • M1 (The Crab Nebula, supernova remnant in Taurus)
  • M45 (The Pleiades, open cluster in Taurus)
  • M36, M37, M38 Overview
    • M36 (open cluster in Auriga)
    • M37 (open cluster in Auriga)
    • M38 (open cluster in Auriga)
• The Third Group
  • M42 and M43 (diffuse nebulae in Orion)
  • M78 (diffuse nebula in Orion)
• The Fourth Group
  • M79 (globular cluster in Lepus)
  • M35 (open cluster in Gemini)
  • Monoceros, Canis Major, and Puppis Overview
    • M50 (open cluster in Monoceros)
    • M41 (open cluster in Canis Major)
    • M46 and M47 (open clusters in Puppis)
    • M93 (open cluster in Puppis)
• Conclusion
• Resources

I thumbnailed the images to minimize download time and make the pages readable for people who are running their browsers at lower than 1280 X 1024 resolution. Clicking on a thumbnail loads the full-size image, which may be as large as 1024 X 768. Most of the images are relatively simple star-chart graphics, so the files are not large despite the moderately high resolution. Each page has three links at the bottom. The left-hand link takes you to the prior page, the right-hand link takes you to the next page, and the center link returns you to this page. I created these pages by doing a simple copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word 2000 into FrontPage 2000, so the HTML code for the pages contains the usual large amount of garbage that Microsoft insists on sticking into HTML pages. I've tested the pages against Internet Explorer 5.01, Opera 6.0, and Mozilla 0.9.6, all of which appear to render the pages more-or-less properly. 

If done in full, the presentation requires about two hours. You can also download the entire presentation in a printable Word 2000 formatted document by clicking here. Note that this is a 2 MB download. Some of the images in this material load from other web sites, so if an image fails to load, please verify that the problem image is actually located on this site before you email me. If you have any suggestions or corrections, please email them to me at thompson@ttgnet.com.