About Clouds of Magellan

About Clouds of Magellan

Clouds of Magellan is a web site dedicated to fostering and facilitating the observing and imaging of the Magellanic Clouds by amateur astronomers. It has been established and operated by myself, Patrick Kavanagh

About Patrick Kavanagh

I have been passionately involved in amateur astronomy since the spectacular approach of Comet McNaught C/2006 P1in early 2007. I live in Central Victoria, Australia with dark skies and clear viewing to the south – a box seat for viewing the Clouds of Magellan. I was fortunate enough to acquire Mati Morel’s wonderful visual atlases of both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. When I started posting notes of my observations of the Magellanic Clouds on the Ice In Space astronomy forum, there were quite a few queries about how to find charts for these spectacular repositories of deep sky objects. So I resolved to make charts of the Magellanic Clouds and present them via the internet, creating them– hence this web site. I have made these charts using Digitized Sky Survey images, identifying the objects shown using the resources outlined below.

Acknowledgements

A number of resources have been critical to putting together the information on this web site. They include Mati Morel’s “Visual Atlas of the Small Magellanic Cloud” and “LMC Visual Atlas 2000”, “Star Clusters” by Brent Archinal and Steven Hynes, Wikisky, the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Digitized Sky Survey, the NGC/IC project, and Mati Morel’s catalogues on the Astronomical Society of NSW web site. Since I have undertaken this work I have come to really appreciate how much work has gone into these remarkable resources. Also indispensible has been the Ice In Space forum from whose members I have learned much, received constant support and encouragement and from whom I have bought most of my equipment.