Future Developments

This project has shown the effectiveness of low cost video digitising in analysing and searching ESO/SERC Sky Surveys for emission line sources. Future surveys, including the proposed H emission line survey of the southern sky to be carried out by the UKST, will provide deep, high resolution images of galactic plane sources.

The application of digital techniques to archival photographic material, while not providing the depth of CCD imaging, does allow the identification of the main features associated with outflows. It is particularly applicable to the discovery of new structures associated with flows more extensive than can be covered by existing CCD formats ().

Ongoing work on the detection of filamentary sources associated with supernova remnants, wind shells and star formation regions is difficult near strong reflection or emission nebulosity. The use of background subtraction techniques using low cost digital imaging systems will increase our success in detecting such features.

We intend making the final image database available on the World Wide Web (WWW) with the hope that future work at near-infrared wavelengths will determine if reddened sources visible on the IVN images are driving the optical HH flows seen in the IIIaJ and IIIa-F images. Access to on-line catalogues has grown substantially over the last few years. An advantage of putting imaging or large data catalogues on the network is that the data is easily accessible and available to the public domain as soon as refereeing is completed.

Examples of catalogues relevant to star formation include Bo Reipurth's A General Catalogue of Herbig-Haro objects (Reipurth 1994) and the Catalogue of Emission Line Stars (Herbig and Bell 1988).

б© Copyright Astronomical Society of Australia 1997