CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF PLANETARY NEBULAE:
THE GALAXY AND THE MAGELLANIC CLOUDS
W. J. Maciel, R. D. D. Costa, T. E. P. Idiart
IAG/USP, Sao Paulo, Brazil
An analysis is made of the chemical composition of
planetary nebulae (PN) in three different systems:
the Galaxy, comprising disk and bulge objects, the
Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic
Cloud (SMC). The data has been gathered by the IAG/USP
group along the last decade in a homogeneous procedure,
involving observational techniques, data acquisition
and reduction. Emphasis is placed on distance-independent
correlations, which are particularly important for PN
in the galactic disk, for which individual distances
are poorly known. It is shown that most abundance
correlations hold for all three systems, taking into
account the observed metallicity differences between
the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds.