One of my many pleasant discoveries in regularly perusing this forum are the Clear Skies Observing Guides. These are in no way to be confused with Alvin's great Faint Fuzzy series (another favorite). CSOG's author has gone to great lengths to create a series of PDF catalogs organized essentially by appropriate aperture (three categories), popular stargazing lists, classes of objects, and constellations. I see he has offered discounts on certain selections to this forum. I went ahead and purchased the complete Northern Hemisphere constellation collection, which is over 13 GB ... not something you will want to download over a Starbucks WiFi connection.
I find this tool valuable for several reasons:
- The objects seem to be quite carefully selected and with considerable expertise. It includes both the best and most popular, along with some great suggestions for more obscure objects.
- It goes to great length to provide a "normalized" image and description of each object, primarily a 30'x30' view. Sure, you could download these images yourself, but there are a lot of images in this collection, which represents a lot of effort. These images give you a great way to make an educated guess as to what you can hope to see with your scope. In fact, you can order your collection with the image oriented to match your eyepiece view.
- It includes supporting files to build observing lists via a number of popular hardware or software solutions. The AstroPlanner integration is especially nice. The two in combination provides an ideal solution to paperless planning.
- There are separate lists for different classes of object. I find it very useful to scan the planetary nebula catalogs for each constellation. It doesn't try to include doubles, but it has catalogs for carbon stars and asterisms; I find this latter category very interesting.
The list for 12" apertures is appropriate for much larger scopes. Indeed, I find it hard to believe that everything in that collection could be seen with only 12", but then I have old and tired eyes. Object categories are split into multiple documents, where necessary, so that if there are a lot of galaxies, you will see a GX-1, GX-2, etc. lists. This ensures the files are suitably sized to download to devices like the iPad.
I have previously used the venerable Deep Sky Observers Guide basically the same way I now use CSOG: scanning it for candidate objects by constellation. However, the DSOG paper volumes have far fewer objects and with very uneven images. CSOG doesn't try to "do it all": what it does, it does very well. It is an invaluable resource to use in conjunction with charting (or paper charts!) and planning software. I keep only the catalogs of interest on my iPad to keep the size down. I guess this could be a good excuse to buy a 64GB iPad...
Highly recommended.
Kemer
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