Keeping observing notes

[Rob_K]

Interesting article by Bob King, titled "Pleasures of Keeping an Astro Journal":
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/pleasures-of-keeping-an-astro-journal02182015/

Cheers -

[barx1963]

What a wonderful article. Love the variety of note taking styles. I started taking notes as after a few weeks of observing with an 8" I simply lost track of which objects I had already seen! I now have 4 volumes of notes in A4 Spiral Bound folders.
I also found that as the volume of observations grew, the issue of knowing what objects I had already seen also grew, so I started a computer database of all the objects with Catalogue numbers, info about them and dates of observations. At the end of each new moon observing "window" I print it out so I have a handy reference on the table when working out what to look at.

Malcolm

[Rob_K]

Fully agree Malcolm! These notes are not only little pieces of astronomical history, but also gems of a person's journey in astronomy. Bob had earlier called for people to submit any notes they might have taken over the years in order to prepare this article. Glad he got a good response! :)

Cheers -

[ZeroID]

I'm a shocker at keeping notes of sessions and if you want to learn from past mistakes they are a must. So I recently created a new spreadsheet in hard copy which I am refining to capture all the relevant details from the usual date\time\environmentals to visual and imaging data and imaging runs\ISO\sensor temps etc.
I need it in a standardised format otherwise it just degenerates into unreadable rubbish.
Still a work in progress but at least I am starting to get consistent information now that lets me make better decisions and compare results.

Which reminds me, I need to go and add a couple more column headers.

[Benjamin]

I've been using AstroPlanner on my laptop to keep notes but have also lost a few notes when I've forgotten to save the session or the computer has crashed/run out of battery. The laptop made sense as I often use Stellarium. Love the idea of keeping written notes though so I don't lose any, but also so sketching can be more a part of the process. At present for me sketching is a whole other process. Be nice to integrate it more as folks do in the various observation pages shown in the excellent article. Might need to plan the observation sessions more though: the planner live updated to show what was up. Thanks for sharing the ideas.

[glend]

I used to keep log sheets for each session, and found them useful for learning the sky and what EPs work best where, etc. However, over the years the sheets piled up, or got wet, and it became less a priority as the usefulness deminished. I stopped. I do still use an observation list that make up in Sky Safari Pro to plan my imaging activities.

[astrospotter]

I talk into a little recorder in the field then transcribe my observations eventually to a spreadsheet. This is organized by RA.

It has been absolutely priceless to me in planing and general checking up on things mentioned in magazines and so on for deep sky where I frankly cannot remember my well over 4000 observations.

Then what has been even nicer for me is I export my spreadsheed to a text file that I use a custom query tool to pull out objects by designation or date or other parameters and include anything near by optionally that I have seen.

I use this all the time to find out if I have seen something and if it was a good enough observation or was not up to par so I would then maybe revisit it. Of course I re-visit the classics all the time and so hundreds of observations of those don't get duplicated so I'm mostly talking about if I want to know if I have seen some ngc or another.

So paper is nice but being able to sort or lookup stuff (spreadsheet) makes retrieval of your observations near painless.

Papers that cover a given night are in fact nice in that you can 'revisit' a night so don't get me wrong but long term memory assist is very handy.

Mark Johnston