Andrew C
02-10-2009, 09:45 PM
I am looking for a means to prepare and print off simple night sky maps for handing out at public star nights, to help people recognise some objects with the naked eye.
It seems to me that the best compromise would be something that shows about 90 degrees of azimuth and from 0-70 degrees of altitude on each A4 sheet in landscape orientation, that would be applicable for a nominated date such as the middle of the relevant month, or the current day, at say 8.30pm or other nominated time. Thus 4 maps from the horizon upwards one for each quadrant, and another circular one displaying from 60-90 degrees altitude overhead giving a little overlap.
The distortions associated with displaying many types of projection are always difficult to grasp and hard to visualise, so for the non-overhead ones I would go for showing a given azimuth direction as a straight vertical line i.e. as the eye sees it when looking in that direction.
Likewise, I find most of the lines linking stars to show the various constellations only clutter the map and make it more difficult to interpret, so the map should only show the stars etc on say a faint 10 degree straight line grid in each direction, or ideally be able to be manipulated to show lines that are specifically wanted.
Major stars, naked eye planets and constellations should be named down to about magnitude +1, and probably only shown at all if as bright as say magnitude +2 or +3, and with progressively larger dots for the brighter objects.
Probably the ecliptic and the SCP should also be shown.
Is there a freeware or other product that will do all of this readily?
It seems to me that the best compromise would be something that shows about 90 degrees of azimuth and from 0-70 degrees of altitude on each A4 sheet in landscape orientation, that would be applicable for a nominated date such as the middle of the relevant month, or the current day, at say 8.30pm or other nominated time. Thus 4 maps from the horizon upwards one for each quadrant, and another circular one displaying from 60-90 degrees altitude overhead giving a little overlap.
The distortions associated with displaying many types of projection are always difficult to grasp and hard to visualise, so for the non-overhead ones I would go for showing a given azimuth direction as a straight vertical line i.e. as the eye sees it when looking in that direction.
Likewise, I find most of the lines linking stars to show the various constellations only clutter the map and make it more difficult to interpret, so the map should only show the stars etc on say a faint 10 degree straight line grid in each direction, or ideally be able to be manipulated to show lines that are specifically wanted.
Major stars, naked eye planets and constellations should be named down to about magnitude +1, and probably only shown at all if as bright as say magnitude +2 or +3, and with progressively larger dots for the brighter objects.
Probably the ecliptic and the SCP should also be shown.
Is there a freeware or other product that will do all of this readily?