Any good freeware star charting programs?

[pgc hunter]

Well, it seems it's completely impossible to find magnitudes for most DSOs on the internet, and the sites that do have 'em, make your brain explode. Does anyone know of any star charting program that has magnitudes for DSOs, particularly for galaxies, including the NGC, UGC, MCG and PGC catalogues? I don't want something where you need to be a Rhodes scholar to decipher thousands of lines of numbers and jargon, I want something that simply gives me the visual magnitude.

[DavidU]

Stellerium seems to be good.

[peter_4059]

Cartes du Ciel V3 is very good.

[Merlin66]

Carte du Ciel has my vote!
You can use the USNO A2 catalogue to get down to 18 mag for comparison stars etc - something my TheSky V6 (which cost $$$$) can't do!

[wasyoungonce]

Of course the projects & articles page (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/projects.html)on this forum is a good source of targets. Many of the lists have visual magnitude of targets.

The list of 111 bright NGC objects
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/63-307-0-0-1-0.html
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/63-268-0-0-1-0.html

All have visual magnitudes listed.

[allan gould]

Try CnebulaX - has it all in spades and lar stellar database

[MrB]

There's a CDC v3 now?
I've been sleeping.

Two thumbs up for Cartes du Ciel here too!
Though apparently I'm now 'old' and still using v2.76 ;)

[MrB]

Ahhh, that explains it, CDC v3 has a new website!
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/

Had me confused for a while there, old website still has v2.76 as the latest.

[pgc hunter]

Thanks for your input everyone. Looks like Cartes V3 is a goer then!

Wasyoungonce, I'm more after catalogues of extremely faint galaxies such as the UGC and PGC.

[pgc hunter]

Btw, where can I get the USNAO-A2 star catalogue? It doesn't appear to be on the Cartes du Ciel website.

[h0ughy]

look here http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/documentation/installation_of_extra_catalogs


as with most things you might need to have a good read and browse around to find what you want

[Robert9]

Also have a look at Astroplanner. Works sort of in conjunction with CDC.
http://www.ilangainc.com/astroplanner/

Robert

[duncan]

Hi All,
Here's another site to try. Lists a whole heap of Astronomy Freeware.
http://freeware.intrastar.net/planetarium.htm

Cheers,
Duncan:eyepop:

[duncan]

Just found this site as well. I'm still going thru everything on it.

http://www.uv.es/jrtorres/index.html

Cheers.

[pgc hunter]

I decided to go with CDC V3. I've also downloaded the latest PGC catalogue so now I have 1.7 million galaxies at my disposal, and the vast majority have their magnitudes listed :D

Cheers.

[G1ZmO]

Excellent CDC V3 runs on Linux too now :)
Yet another reason to avoid lining the pockets of Mr Gates :P

Whoop!

Paul

[Omaroo]

http://www.uv.es/jrtorres/CNebulaX.htm

Hmm....haven't come across it before. Interesting project for sure.

[citivolus]

I've made the offer in the past, but I'll post it here: If anyone wants USNO-A2.0 on DVD and doesn't want to have to download it, I can burn a copy on a couple of DVDs and mail it to you. It is about 6GB.

Regards,
Eric

[dpastern]

Neither have I. Just installing it all now. Looks quite good.

Dave

[mithrandir]

Interesting, but clicking some things crashes it under Wine.

[dpastern]

Seems to work OK under Windows Vista x64 with the usual caveats of run in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2 and admin...I like it, it's a neat program. One thing though - when setting up your site location, it only has W, not E. So I'm not sure what to do...also, it keeps wanting to refer to a c:\program files(x86)\CNebulaX\DSS folder for NGC/IC objects, but there's no DSS folder. Manually creating the folder and moving the necessary dbase items into it doesn't seem to work...

Dave

Dave

[mithrandir]

US programmers tend to use + signs for west & north. European ones (like this) + for east and north. Don't you love standards? You can always find one to suit your preconceptions.

It doesn't seem to like paths with spaces in them and probably only likes 8.3 names, reflecting the DOS origins no doubt. I installed to C:\CNebulaX and created all the folders it complained about.

In the time setup, should Sydney DST be +11 or -11 for the UTC offset? In the Unix world it would be -11.

[mithrandir]

The usac3 catalogs for CDC3 are about 4.7GB. Even leaving out ucac3-catalog-north.zip (north of +30) only saves 600MB

[dpastern]

I'll try that tomorrow night (knackered and heading off to bed now). I believe it's +10 GMT, not sure on UTC.

Dave