This website would never have seen the light of day without the creativity and perseverance of the interns from the Williams Instructional Technology program and the guidance and patience of their fearless leader, Adam Wang. In particular, Jason Potell and Jake Mandel were instrumental in the success of this project. Other contributing WIT interns include Parth Doshi, Catherine Kiwala, Spencer Wong, Sam Gilford, Dennis Immonje, JiYong Kim, Tsubasa Tanaka and C. Prosper Nwankpa.
In the summer of 2006, a WIT team including Jing Cao, Janice Park and Sarah Riskind, completely redesigned the look and feel of the website, making it more intuitive and easier to use. Comb Hua and Adam Wang of OIT were, as usual, indispensably helpful.
Matthew Johnson (Wesleyan '07; Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium summer exchange student) and Jesse Levitt '08 updated many of the images and links in 2005-6. We thank Jackie Milingo (Ph. D. University of Oklahoma, 2000, now at Gettysburg College), whose thesis focused on the southern PNe, and more recently, the Type I PNe included here.
The following undergraduates participated in the observations and/or data analysis of the spectra in this database:
The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions.
The National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory.
The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The blue plates of the southern Sky Atlas and its Equatorial Extension (together known as the SERC-J), as well as the Equatorial Red (ER), and the Second Epoch [red] Survey (SES) were all taken with the UK Schmidt. All data are subject to the copyright given in the copyright summary. Copyright information specific to individual plates is provided in the downloaded FITS headers. Supplemental funding for sky-survey work at the ST ScI is provided by the European Southern Observatory.In the initial version, the spectrum display applet made heavy use of the Graph library created by Leigh Brookshaw (© 1995, 1996) and used under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This research has been supported by Williams College and the University of Oklahoma, and by National Science Foundation grants AST-9819123, AST-0307118, and AST-0806490. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.