http://www.DaHut.net
The DJ Project - The Sharpless (SH2-x) Bright Nebulaes
The Astronomical League (AL) Bright Nebulae Project, completed in July 2014, introduced us to the Sharpless series of
Bright Nebulae. In that collection, there were about 40 of the Sharpless items, either listed as SH2 objects, or under
different “common” names.
Stewart Sharpless a founding “Cloud Hunter”... died on January 19, 2013 at the age of 86.
The following 2 paragraphs from: http://galaxymap.org/drupal/node/33
The first major HII region survey for the northern hemisphere was published by Stewart Sharpless in 1953. Sharpless was
based at the US Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Unlike the surveys done in the southern hemisphere, Sharpless
did not create his own images but instead used existing red-filtered photographs taken using the 48 inch Schmidt
telescope on Palomar Mountain, southeast of Los Angeles. The first Sharpless catalog contained 142 nebulae.
Sharpless revised his first catalog using additional plates (also acquired from the 48 inch Schmidt telescope on Palomar
Mountain) produced for the National Geographic - Palomar Sky Atlas (usually called POSS-I). He published his second and
final catalog of 313 nebulae in 1959.
The DJ Project (David Jan) is a personal mission to find, and image as many of the the total 313 Sharpless (SH2-xx)
nebulae, using a Baader 7nm (nano memter bandwith) filter, to capture the Ha regions. The various objects are
universally rated in three groups of “brightness”. They are all trully VERY DIM, and difficult, if not impossible to see
withut the aid of a HA filter, and a good camera capable of taking very long exposure images. The three (3) ratings are:
(3) The very brightest (2) Mid-Range Brightness and (1) VERY VERY DIM.
You can see our spreadsheets and links to images that have been taken by following the link below. This will be an on-
going project, which is now started in 2014, and will probably take several years to complete.
Link to the Spreadsheet and Images
313 Objects
