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Agree on spreadsheet method
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
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