star chart software recommends...??

[wavydavy]

Can someone recommend a decent star chart software with detailed stars down to a reasonable magnitude?? Preferably with a trial run, so I can see if its any good........any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Uplooker]

Cart du Ceil - its free. A lot of people recommend Stellarium but think it is too heavy on graphics thereby being processor hungry

http://sourceforge.net/projects/skychart/

Ian

[D4N]

I agree, CDC is great and it's really easy to control the scope with it.

I generally use sky safari on my iPad when deciding what to point at then use CDC to do the slewing. You can download extra data for it if you want more than the default.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[wavydavy]

Great thanks guys!!

[wavydavy]

Downloaded.looks ok, but its seems light on the amount of stars.......is there a setting to change the magnitude??

[Tinker1947]

Stellarium has additional add-ons, CdC has a shed load of stuff to alter to your liking something i have never tried out...

[Cornelius Varley]

More catalogues are available on the website http://ap-i.net/skychart/en/download

[Vox45]

In stellarium you can download a very large catalog of Stars.

From Wiki :

"Stellarium is packaged with over 600 thousand stars in the normal program download, but much larger star catalogues may be downloaded using the tool which is in the Tools tab of the Configuration dialog."

[D4N]

Yep I had to download all the star packages in Stellarium before it would show a star I had captured (I wanted to know the magnitude of the faintest star in view). For most uses you don't need this many stars though, especially if you have goto and just use the star charts to choose targets.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Uplooker]

Downloaded.looks ok, but its seems light on the amount of stars.......is there a setting to change the magnitude??

 First off, there is a button on the top toolbar (just slightly left of middle) that has 2 red disc and 2 blue discs, one above the other. By hitting the larger of either the red or the blue you can increase the number of stars or nebs or galaxies - can't remeber which.

Then you can also download a whole host of add-ons to show doubles stars etc.

Ian

[Tinker1947]

 First off, there is a button on the top toolbar (just slightly left of middle) that has 2 red disc and 2 blue discs, one above the other. By hitting the larger of either the red or the blue you can increase the number of stars or nebs or galaxies - can't remeber which.

Then you can also download a whole host of add-ons to show doubles stars etc.

Ian

I have only ever used CdC to control the scope, these buttons you have mentioned are really good....Maybe i should spend some time clicking on some of the other's...

[Earl]

I use CdC for scope control, but stellarium for sitting at the pc to see whats about.

[Uplooker]

I have only ever used CdC to control the scope, these buttons you have mentioned are really good....Maybe i should spend some time clicking on some of the other's...

When you say scope control, do you mean selecting objects and hitting "slew to"?

Ian

[Tinker1947]

I do mean that, i also use Stellarium but it doesn't seem so stable as CdC, well i have rewire (USB) the Obby so it may be ok now, not had the sky's to test it....

[D4N]

Stellarium is much nicer to look at but I prefer CDC for scope control as it is quicker to open it, connect, select & slew than it is to walk over to the mount and use the hand controller. A lot less chance of tripping over and breaking something too

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[DaveS]

I use Stellarium to look at targets, but for 'scope control CduC wins every time, I just cannot get Stellarium to talk to my mount via EQMOD, and TBH it's just no worth the hassle. I do prefer the night mode on Stellarium though, CduC doesn't go completely red and messes up the tool bar when it closes.

[wavydavy]

Thanks for your help everyone!

[DaveS]

Oh, and you won't need a trial mode with either Stellarium or Cartes du Ciel, as they're both free.