Wixeys with a print-out graph?

[Andrew*]

I know some users of alt/az mounted scopes (e.g. dobs) use a Wixey angle gauge and a laptop to find the altitude of objects.

I was wondering, to save even bothering with a laptop, is it possible to print out graphs or tables of the altitudes of specific objects during the time you will be observing? Maybe some software can produce these graphs.

I know it would be quicker to just use the laptop (or a PDA...), but my laptop's battery is dud, so I also have to bother with power leads and stuff.

Any ideas of a program that could do this?

cheers

Andrew

[brympton]

Hi Andrew,

Funnily enough I have been looking into the same sort of thing since moving away from power packs and goto eq mounts. So I have considered pretty well the whole shooting match from digital setting circles to Astro-Fix locators and Wixey's which all seem to present the same problem; the requirement to be running some sort of software in the field. I have been using Stellarium to forward predict the position of targets but with only limited sucess - no surprises there! So now I have a choice, buy a pda and some software such as Astromist or consider the one solution that currently appeals to me which is a Telrad, plenty of charts available, low cost and no computer assistance. Once again time will tell whether this is the right choice but most of the stuff I've read seems positive.

Regards

Mark