Does anyone know of a utility which will allow us S. Hemisphere observers to generate observing lists with R. Ascension as the organising factor? I thought this would keep telescope re positioning to a minimum - a real advantage if you've got an unwieldy scope or ladder to move each time.
Ideally, the utility would also allow you to specify parameters such as magnitude or object type, but I suspect I might be asking for too much....
SkyTools3 Pro. However it is more than just an observing list generator but well worth the price. SkyTools can also generate lists based on chart number from various popular star charts as well as handbooks such as Burnhams. (ie. lists per consellation). Many other user lists are available free to download within SkyTools3. The Pro version has more stars and the real time module which in my opinion is worth the extra.
SkyTools allows you to organise your observing list ordered by RA, Dec, magnitude, size, etc. Unfortunately it's not a freebie, but it's a very good package.
G'day Chris, The link below is from a thread a couple of weeks ago. It's about a free program that is called Astroplanner. I had never heard of it before reading that thread and on investigation it is a great program. It will do all the things you ask for and more, and its free. Take a look and let us know what you think. Towards the end of that thread I have posted some screen shots etc.
AstroPlanner is the way to go.
Paul Rodman promised me this 30 years ago when we were in South Africa.....now he's come good.
Excellent program, excellent support.
FWIW I made my own Bright Southern objects (BSOs) list in excel that can be ordered in any manner you want, from +20 degrees DEC to -90 DEC to magnitude 11.
If you want to print it just "hide" the RA/DAC decimal columns...they are superfluous. You need to enable my macros to run (when opening the sheet) to enable conversion of RA & DEC decimal values to HMS etc.
Last edited by wasyoungonce; 27-08-2010 at 09:32 AM.
Hi, Astrobyte is a great logging system that allows for RA sorting as well as sorting by constellation, mag, object type and about any variable you can imagine. Ok the last is a slight exaggeration.
However Astrobyte is free and it has a data base of @ 10,000 objects.
Recently I combined information from the NGC/IC Project 'list generator' with Astrobyte to give me a fairly complete list by constellation and RA of what John Herschel observed.
They are two powerful resources. And as they are both free you loose nothing by downloading one and using the other.
Brian
