GSSP 2026 Observing Program: The Cow and The Calf

[Akarsh Simha]

Hello TACos:

Since last year, I decided to try and make an observing list for every GSSP. This was prompted after a few years ago, I randomly listed a bunch of objects on TAC and I found that a bunch of people were looking at them. Well, I don't know how many people tried last year's program "Settle your Beef with the Milky Way", which was mostly based on observing various stages of stellar evolution peppered with a few extragalactic objects.

I present to you, this year's list: "The Cow and The Calf". The theme is: one or more tougher objects in a single field around / within a main object.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fM8MpfY9Q3NcONRl2V6lafNH-qriBtaBDbvgnk84_Zs/edit?tab=t.0

This time I've made an effort to keep the charts "printer friendly" i.e. they're all black on white. The entire document is designed to be color-inverted for use with a red-filter screen, I'll release the digital / mobile version shortly.

Hope you enjoy the list. You can see I had good support in making it.

Clear Skies

Akarsh

PS: I was tempted to include a whimsical example: Hoag's object, and the ring galaxy seen in the HST image through the Hoag's Object! :-P

[Akarsh Simha]

Compressed printable PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cbGxf5M50QwRctdcSJ7Em9L7z55o6GD5/view?usp=sharing

Compressed screen-friendly PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/141zfrLjkASPnslpJ3s8qdk4WeTtnD7P9/view?usp=sharing

The screen-friendly version was generated with a hack: the PDF will render the black-on-white version and then draw a filled rectangle from which it will subtract the black-on-white version to product the white-on-black version. This means depending on the speed of your PDF renderer, you may see a momentary white flash when opening, scrolling or zooming the PDF which can be jarring at night even with a red filter. You've been warned. Next time, I'll do the opposite -- make the screen-friendly version natively and then do the invert trick for the printable. Sorry about that, learning new things.

Clear Skies

Akarsh

[Akarsh Simha]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2026 at 11:37 PM Akarsh Simha <akars...@gmail.com> wrote:

Compressed printable PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cbGxf5M50QwRctdcSJ7Em9L7z55o6GD5/view?usp=sharing

Compressed screen-friendly PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/141zfrLjkASPnslpJ3s8qdk4WeTtnD7P9/view?usp=sharing

The screen-friendly version was generated with a hack: the PDF will render the black-on-white version and then draw a filled rectangle from which it will subtract the black-on-white version to product the white-on-black version. This means depending on the speed of your PDF renderer, you may see a momentary white flash when opening, scrolling or zooming the PDF which can be jarring at night even with a red filter. You've been warned. Next time, I'll do the opposite -- make the screen-friendly version natively and then do the invert trick for the printable. Sorry about that, learning new things.

Another snag with the screen-friendly version. It renders fine on my laptop both in Google Drive and with KDE's Okular software. I'm sure Adobe Acrobat will render it fine too. But on my iPhone, it looks like Preview doesn't understand the negation hack -- so you'll need to download the PDF to your phone and use a different program. I had success with Adobe Acrobat (free version) on my iPhone. TACos who work at Apple, take note :-P

[Richard Navarrete]

That is a LOT of work, Akarsh! Thanks so much to everyone for putting this together.

Richard

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

--
Observing Sites, Observing Reports, About TAC linked at top of:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-bay-tac
 
Subscribers post to the mailing list at:
 
sf-ba...@googlegroups.com,
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Astronomy Connection (TAC)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sf-bay-tac+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/CA%2B9k5twnWN2mvGvaa_0%3D46eF63sppRJxLxKwJ8QDuLf2EJUMVQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ido Greiman]

Let me second what Richard said - Amazing work! Thank you for doing it!

Ido

[Rod Brown]

Wow! Detailed and comprehensive. Thank you!