[Chaos-l] Wil Tirion's _The Cambridge Star Atlas_

[Jon Stewart-Taylor]

Hi all. The GALLAGHERs wrote:

> [...]  5 degrees on a side down to 8th mag, for example would be  
> helpful to bring along.

Well, it's about 40 x 50 degrees instead of 5x5, but it's printed on  
12x20 paper instead of 8.5x11, but Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000 is indeed  
9th magnitude, and it's what i use when i'm hunting faint fuzzies in  
the middle of nowhere.  That said, "most" planetarium software will  
let you zoom in to a given magnification.  Whether they have stars  
down to mag 9 probably varies.  I use Stellarium, which is indeed free.

It's "supposed" to create screenshots in bmp format, but i haven't  
managed to get it to do that under MacOSX.  I use Grab instead, which  
creates a TIFF file.  If you want, i can e-mail you an example.   
They're kinda big, though, about 200-300 Mb, depending on how big you  
make them, how much detail, etc.

Hope that's helpful.

J.
-- 
Jon Stewart-Taylor:  joncst at earthlink.net
Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos