Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterM
Oh Suzy you are so very good! Congratulations you do amateur astronomy a great service here! Should be a sticky on this!
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Thank you so much for the very kind compliment- probably one of the nicest things anyone's said to me - it means a lot and it's very encouraging, thank you again, Peter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterM
Also if you have a smart phone there are many great astro apps. I like Star Chart as a general guide to the sky but there are many many good ones.
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You mean I missed something???
Peter, I hope you don't mind me just adding some further input to those apps
but it seems I can't stop typing today so it's going to happen anyway.
I have both apps Star Chart and Skeye, I use both but tend to use Skeye more. I like that Star Chart clearly shows the brightest stars in each constellation and also by pressing on the star, it gives the information on it, i.e. alpha centauri, "X" million light years away, magnitude, spectral class etc.
Skeye gives less information but I like that it acts as a "go-to". In other words, type in the object you want to find and the arrow will guide you to it with a circle centred on the object found, or just place the circle on the object and it'll tell you what it is. Accuracy though can be affected as I get a regularly annoying warning of "magnetic interference" which if I didn't know any better would have me often believing that for example Orion sits where Carina should sit. So I think a certain level of familiarity with the sky is needed to begin with. I don't use Star Chart that much to test its accuracy.
Btw, a great new app I have which I love to pieces is called
Astro Panel. It tells you pretty much everything you need to know for a good viewing session in a table format; cloud cover, humidity, seeing, transparency, wind, temp, lunar phase, lunar altitude, sunrise/set. I've had it for a few months now and I've been finding it to be pretty accurate so far.