Are there available star charts to mag 20?

[Lester]

Hi all, I am keen to see how faint a star I can capture with my equipment. Are there star charts available with stars to magnitude 20? I have done a google search but was unable to find what I am after.

Thanks.

[Dennis]

Hi Lester

I use the on-line USNO Flagstaff Station Integrated Image and Catalogue Archive Service search at:

http://www.nofs.navy.mil/data/FchPix/

Basically, you enter the RA and DEC coordinates of the centre of the field and the size of the field and a plot is displayed (or e-mail link provided) which show stars down to at least mag 21.

Remember to set the correct epoch, I use J2000.

Cheers

Dennis

[Terry B]

Depending on what catalogue you load you can get very deep images from here
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

[Lester]

Thanks Dennis and Terry, they will be very helpful.

All the best.

[Lester]

I have had a look in both those links. Although they show many faint stars, I am after something that would inform me of a magnitude of these faint stars, so that I can compare to my images. With The Sky 6 I can click on any star and it will inform me of that star's magnitude etc. with magnitude 15 being the faintest. So is there something similar that goes to magnitude 20?

Thanks.

[Dennis]

Hi Lester

With The Sky 6 Pro I used to have the USNO-A2.0 database, a catalogue of 526,280,881 stars that went down to around mag 19. It was a 6 GB free download from http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/catalogs/ua2.html although I don’t know if it is still available.

TheSkyX Pro now has an Add On product distributed on a USB hard drive that can be purchased from the Software Bisque Store, which again goes down to around mag 19 although it only works with The Sky X and not The Sky 6 and it costs around US $220.

Cheers

Dennis

[PeterM]

Lester I am pretty sure I still have the USNO database for Sky6 (about 6gig) that Dennis mentions. If you would like me to copy it onto a DVD just send me your address by pm and I will post same.
PeterM

[Lester]

Thanks Dennis and Peter for your comments/help/offer, I appreciate it. I will PM you Peter.

All the best.

[cathalferris]

There's a large database called the PPMXL going down to mag 20 that can be used with Cartes du Ciel (new name Skychart) from http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download, the instructions for obtaining and processing it are here. I've got it running on my CdC installation, but it can take a bit of time to display, but my pc is only a dualcore Athlon Black with 6gb ram and raid10 disks - a more beefy machine should be significantly faster. Fully extracted and processed it takes up ~180Gb.
Other astro programs may be able to use the database as well but you may have to contact the vendor.
It's a 38gb download before the processing starts.