A compilation of our southern hemisphere catalogues

These catalogues have nothing to do with the Cloud, except for the handful of clusters that are located in it, but having put them together with their images to help with their identification, they needed a home! We have some fabulous southern catalogues that make wonderful observing projects as they run the gamut from bright and bold objects to those that are small and obscure. 

Observing the objects in Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille’s catalogue is fabulous because it contains some of the southern hemisphere’s greatest treasures (47 Tuc, Omega Centauri, Tarantula Nebula, Eta Carinae Nebula, et al)… all of which he discovered using an incredibly small 1/2-inch refractor. 

The “Baracchi 59” are the 59 unpublished visual discoveries that Pietro Baracchi made using the 48″ Great Melbourne Telescope during the years 1884-1888. 

The two southern clusters discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1938 may be very small and they may be very faint – but what a delight to observe the two southern clusters discovered by the extraordinary young man who discovered Pluto. 

While some of the Gum nebulae are lovely brightish targets, many of those within reach of our telescopes are small, faint and elusive. But who amongst us doesn’t love the thrill of catching that small, faint, elusive nebula floating in the foreverness of space? 

Both Canis Major and Puppis are treasure troves for the open cluster observer. And for the observer of small wonders the seldom-observed 26 Haffner open clusters they contain are a tremendous observing project.

The twenty four Pişmiş open clusters make a delightful observing project. A few of them are exquisitely bright and delicate, others appear as tiny glints of stars mingled with a faint hazy glow of unresolved starlight, and yet others appear as little more than a faint and tantalizing mistiness.

In 1993 the 14 Lyngå open clusters became 13 open clusters and one globular cluster when Ortolani et al. determined that Lyngå 7 is in actual fact a globular cluster. It and the 13 open clusters offer a tremendous project of clusters from the richly populated globular cluster to lovely clusters to those that are delicate gatherings of a few stars.

The twenty two Hogg open clusters offer an unusually rich observing project – not because the clusters themselves are rich – indeed, many of them are notably obscure – but because they all lie in exceptionally lush and beautiful star fields, with many of them juxtaposed with lovely NGC and Trumpler clusters.

South African Jack Bennett (1914-1990) was an extremely skilled amateur astronomer and dedicated comet-hunter. He drew up two lists of southern objects that appeared comet-like in his telescope. He referred to them as “shades of Messier…”

All but two of the fifteen Bochum open clusters reside in the southern hemisphere and can be found along our summer Milky Way in Gemini, Monoceros, and Puppis, with a couple in our rich winter Milky Way constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius.