Printing good charts?

[swedonator]

Print in cartes du ciel, messy.

Print in Starry Night, poor quality, small text.

How do you print good charts? which software? settings?

[Paul M]

I recently came across the disk for "Guide 7" an oldish desktop planetarium from the 90's/00's

Forgot I had it and had to download a patch to get it to run in Win7. A bit clunky by modern standards but I remember it seemed to print very good custom star charts.

The latest version looks like being much more polished and isn't overly expensive.

The author claims it to be extremely accurate in time and positional data.

[M00NMonkey]

Hi Swedenator,

I found his link here on SGL somewhere, yesterday.

http://www.solarius.net/Pages/Articles/dbArticle.aspx?artid=messier_finders

Hope it helps

Jez

[Paul M]

I recently came across the disk for "Guide 7" an oldish desktop planetarium from the 90's/00's

Forgot I had it and had to download a patch to get it to run in Win7. A bit clunky by modern standards but I remember it seemed to print very good custom star charts.

The latest version looks like being much more polished and isn't overly expensive.

The author claims it to be extremely accurate in time and positional data.

Ooops! Forgot the link! http://www.projectpluto.com/

[mdstuart]

Hmm..my charts from carte du ciel are fine...What do you mean messy?

[bendiddley]

Sky Safari does good print outs, but it is software you have to buy. Also I used to make my own star maps by doing screen shots from stellarium and bringing them into a desktop publishing program, worked well but I got tired of doing it, so i decided to buy Sky and Telescope's Pocket Atlas instead, i haven't looked back, fantastic star guide and very easy to use, would recommend.

[AndyWB]

I set Stellarium up to take inverted screenshots, and just used that. Combined with the ocular tool, I find it handy - what it shows is almost exactly what I see. I did also increase the number of labels that it shows for stars, etc.. I find it adequate.

[Stargazer_00]

Best ones out there are TriAtlas and DeepSkyProjects one.

These compare to the most expensive and comprehensive atlas' ever produced.

http://www.uv.es/jrtorres/triatlas.html

Havent got the link to the other one but there is a thread about this right now in the observing discussion forum

[earth titan]

Have to say I thought CDC was excellent last time I used it. Will have to back and compare with others now...

[LukeSkywatcher]

When i was into printing charts, i used a flatbed scanner and TLAO.

[Ohmless]

My favorite atlas that is free for printing out(creative commons license) is the mag 7 star atlas. It will show everything visible in a 50mm finderscope. http://www.siaris.net/astro/atlas/

Otherwise for detail maps, I print out from Carte du Ceil, though I never had an issue with print quality. Is everything too close and overlapping? If so zoom in before printing.