All,
Attached is a screenshot of the SMC that I made using the MOL catalogue
distributed with Cartes du Ciel in Distro Astro 3.0.
To make it work, I had to change many of the default settings in
Cartes du Ciel, the most important being
Setup > Chart, coordinates > Object filter
Limiting magnitude: 99,99,15.01,15.01,11.01,10.01,9.01, 7.01,5.01,5.01
This displays all objects in the catalog only in fields-of-view
smaller than 2 degrees. (Display all objects in larger fields, and
the program locks up from the large number of objects.)
I also had to install other star catalogues: Hipparchos (mag 12)
and UCAC (mag 16). You have to include at least the Hipp catalogue
to provide a useful amount of field stars, and this is not provided
with Distro Astro.
And I spent a lot of time moving the labels because they were
crashing into each other. (I always disable CdC's feature to fix
crashing labels because it "fixes" many crashes by deleting labels.)
I checked the positions of some objects in the SMC outskirts
against Hodge's photographic atlas and the positions look very good.
(Hodge shows too many stars to check the interior SMC.)
Compare the attached SMC chart with the chart in another thread:
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?t=101380
Clear skies,
- sutekh