Simplified printable star maps?

[Andrew C]

I am looking for a means to prepare and print off simple night sky maps for handing out at public star nights, to help people recognise some objects with the naked eye.

It seems to me that the best compromise would be something that shows about 90 degrees of azimuth and from 0-70 degrees of altitude on each A4 sheet in landscape orientation, that would be applicable for a nominated date such as the middle of the relevant month, or the current day, at say 8.30pm or other nominated time. Thus 4 maps from the horizon upwards one for each quadrant, and another circular one displaying from 60-90 degrees altitude overhead giving a little overlap.

The distortions associated with displaying many types of projection are always difficult to grasp and hard to visualise, so for the non-overhead ones I would go for showing a given azimuth direction as a straight vertical line i.e. as the eye sees it when looking in that direction.

Likewise, I find most of the lines linking stars to show the various constellations only clutter the map and make it more difficult to interpret, so the map should only show the stars etc on say a faint 10 degree straight line grid in each direction, or ideally be able to be manipulated to show lines that are specifically wanted.

Major stars, naked eye planets and constellations should be named down to about magnitude +1, and probably only shown at all if as bright as say magnitude +2 or +3, and with progressively larger dots for the brighter objects.

Probably the ecliptic and the SCP should also be shown.

Is there a freeware or other product that will do all of this readily?

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

You could use something like this:

http://pp3.sourceforge.net/

to create your own maps. Limit the mags to mag 4 or 5 and include only messier objects.

Dave

[Screwdriverone (Chris)]

Hi Andrew,

Rob Horvat from my club Western Sydney Amateur Astronomy Group (WSAAG) has developed a set of printable star maps for visual observing which show all constellations in the Southern Hemisphere the right way up! He has done some extensive programming and plotting to make these very handy maps showing objects of interest in most constellations visible from the southern hemisphere.

They don't fulfill all of your wishlist and are static (meaning they don't change based on the current sky like planetarium progams do), but they are available free on his website which is here http://sites.google.com/site/southernastronomer/

The direct link to download the file is below
http://sites.google.com/site/souther...attredirects=0

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Chris

[Andrew C]

Both excellent suggestions, and thanks, but is anyone aware of one that simply shows objects in their orientation as actually seen with the naked eye at a given time i.e representing azimuth bearings as vertical lines, or what might be called an alt azimuth map??

[Outbackmanyep]

Try SkyMaps ! They even have a list of objects etc! Just make sure you select the SOUTHERN SKY pdf!

http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html

[Liz]

Have been on Rob's website this morning, and so much wonderful info available there.

https://sites.google.com/site/southernastronomer/

The star charts are wonderful, and I see some new ones for Carbon Stars, which I love, the printer will be getting another workout.

Thank you Rob.

[MrB (Simon)]

Cartes Du Ciel does a pretty good job of printing out custom maps. You just get the field as you want it on the screen, then print. Easy.
Will attach a PDF example later (on the phone ATM)