A new deep sky atlas

[Martin Meredith]

I'd like to announce the first all-sky release of a new deep atlas: 

http://tinyurl.com/prettydeepmaps

The atlas was conceived to support electronically-assisted observing, but it will also be useful for other deep sky enthusiasts, both visual and imaging. Some might be interested in the object index which can be used independently of the charts, and which allows filtering more than 100000 DSOs by constellation, and sorting on any number of properties e.g. magnitude, angular size, redshift etc. The atlas is free and simply requires a decent PDF viewer (I recommend Acrobat). The whole thing is a rather large download but can be acquired by constellation or seasonal groups. 

All the bundled constellations (e.g. north circumpolar) are already there, but some of the individual constellations (mainly spring/summer) are still being uploaded. If you experience any problems, let me know. There are daily download limits on dropbox that could conceivably be breached 

Martin

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Looks very nice. Excellent work!

[Astrojedi]

Martin,

Thank you for putting this together. It is an incredible effort and a great benefit to the community. I am already enjoying the indexes and have found a few galaxy clusters I missed which look very interesting. Combined with the maps should really make exploring the deep skies very enjoyable.

Hiten

[aparker]

Martin,

Thanks for pulling these together.  A great resource for the EAA community and deep sky enthusiasts in general.  I look forward to browsing them and dreaming up my next observing session!

Alex

[aparker]

I can't resist one tongue-in-cheek branding suggestion.

If you were to re-christen the project "pretty good charts" then the acronym would be PGC

[aparker]

A few of the individual constellation links did not work for me (404) when I tried them just now (Vir and Leo did not).  Uma I was able to link to and D/L.

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks Michael, Hiten and Alex.

The remaining constellations are uploading as we speak (though Leo et al are already there in the Spring bundle…). I was up early this morning and spotted Leo so maybe it is spring already, although at -4C maybe not.

Nice idea about the name Alex given that the maps are crawling with PGCs. Actually, the existing name arose when I was showing the maps to an astronomical acquaintance who thought mag 18 was pretty deep, and it stuck. Rod Mollise mentioned an earlier version of the maps on his blog, calling them "insanely deep", which I also like a lot, but being British I'm going to stick with the understated version for now ;-)

Martin

[laudropb]

Thanks for such a great resource.

[Ruud]

Many thanks, Martin, the atlas is huge. Enormous. Overwhelming!

[RobertI]

Superb. Can we make this a sticky?

Edited December 2, 2015 by RobertI

[m.tweedy]

Thank you.

[Dave In Vermont]

Very well done, Martin! Excellent!

The download went very smoothly - especially considering it's mass - and the extraction and ease of finding things within were and are intuitive - which is great!

A stellar achievement in the gestalt sense.

All the best -

Dave

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks Laudropb, Ruud, Rob, Michael and Dave.

Dave, I'm pleased the download went fine. It means I must have some dropbox bandwidth left (I have the pro account which gives me up to 100G of traffic a day apparently, which means up to 11 people/day can download the whole monster ;-).

I'll soon be writing up what some of the chart annotations actually mean…

Martin

[Martin Meredith]

The (extensive) documentation for the maps is now available here.

Martin

[Dave In Vermont]

Excellent paper there, Martin. Thank you!

Dave

[Chuck1]

Great stuff Martin,

Sucessfull down load and unzip, the PDF files appear in the my directory and will open up with data but no map appears.

Downloaded and opens on my Kindle Fire 7 also, but no map.

Suggestions/

Thanks,

Chuck

 

 

[Martin Meredith]

Hi Chuck

Some suggestions: You need to ensure that all the pdfs (indexes and charts) are in a single directory. Are you using Acrobat Reader to open them? Not all PDF readers operate correctly with links.

Martin

[Dave In Vermont]

I've found the latest versions of Adobe are really poor - time-lag in opening, crashing, spending all your time looking for update & downloads, etc. I find Sumatra much better as a reader these days. Take a look if you like:

http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

Good stuff free,

Dave

[Martin Meredith]

I was excited about Sumatra until I saw it only works with Windows ;-) You're right, the most recent Acrobat is not the best. I suggest not using the DC version, in part because it takes up too much screen space with its own icons (which are tedious to remove).

Martin

[Chuck1]

Thanks for all the reply's.  I got it now, I did not realize I needed to get the Finder first. Lots of info and I just missed the basic part of the process.

I think we are off and running now. Looks extremely interesting.

 

Chuck

 

Edited February 1, 2016 by Chuck1
spelling and word insert.

[Martin Meredith]

Chuck, I just wanted to check that you have v0.3, since you mention the finder which was a v0.2 concept that I no longer use. Or by finder do you mean the index?

Martin

[Chuck1]

Uh oh.. I guess i have the wrong version. Can you steer me to version 0.3 link?

Lots of info to absorb.

Chuck

 

[Chuck1]

Martin,

 

I tried  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14005918/index.htm 

but see nothing about version0.3

 

Chuck

 

[Martin Meredith]

Yes, that's the right one. Be sure to check out the technical document (which does say v0.3 )

Martin

 

[Chuck1]

Got it Martin,

I pulled out all the stuff from the proper folder, downloaded the North Circumpolar, unzipped to the folder and all seems well. So will press on with the rest of the downloads as time permits.

I see what I did wrong, I was kinda looking for .EXE or .MSI type of thing. We are good to go until the next question!!!

 

Thanks,

Chuck