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I am a big fan of the dictaphone. As a lawyer by day, I dictate all my correspondence, so it is an entirely natural extension of that to dictate by night too. I have a very small digital dictaphone - not much bigger than an eraser, so it slips in the pocket between objects.
The benefit of dictating is that you can record your observations WHILE you are looking at the object, rather than looking, then turning away to write/draw. This has transformed my observing - I find that I see and note a lot more. In the days before dictating my observations, my records tended to be very vague and sloppy. Now, my description of an open cluster can run for half a page!!!
The cumbersome part is making a transcript of the observing notes. I am hoping to find some software sometime soon that can do this for me without the time and effort of manually typing.
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