Collinder catalog PDF
February 16, 2010Cloudy Nights has a great article about the Collinder Catalog, a list of 471 open clusters compiled by Swedish astronomer Per Arne Collinder for his 1931 dissertation. There have been requests in the forum to post the catalog as a PDF, so I copied the list and notes into OpenOffice (which is free, and awesome, btw) and exported it as a PDF. I would have simply posted the PDF to the Cloudy Nights forums, but they don’t allow attachments larger than 124 Kb. So I’m putting it here instead.
Please note that this is not my work at all; Thomas Watson did all of the heavy lifting in terms of updating Collinder’s list and turning it into a useful observing too. All I’ve done is convert it into a PDF so people can use it more easily.
Update, October 20, 2010: Thomas Watson posted an updated version of the catalog which corrects some minor errors in the first version. The v2 PDF below reflects those changes. Thanks for the heads up, Thomas–and for the mountain of work! It is certainly a lovely gift to the observing community.
The file:
10 Minute Astronomy 
As a neophyte amateur, I am thrilled to discover the lesser known catalogs such as Collinder, Abel, Sharpless, etc. Thanks for putting this together and sharing it.
Just an FYI:
Several errors (mostly incorrect RA and DEC) have been pointed out over the past couple of years by users of my Collinder Catalog article on Cloudy Nights. A corrected version of the catalog has now been posted to the website, here: http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=2544
Glad to see so many people have found this article to be so useful!
Thomas Watson
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the heads up about the changes, and thanks very much for all of your hard work in making the Collinder Catalog accessible to observers. You da man!
Hi Thomas,
thanks for your work. I’m observing at the edge of Berlin. So the sky is not really dark and nebulas und galaxies cannot be seen. I decided to go especially for open clusters.
Your catalogue will be a great help for me.
Torsten Moldenhauer, Berlin (Germany)
Glad to hear that!