Star Charts - finding a way around 'bland' areas

[Mr Spock]

As part of my double star observing, I'm printing out maps using CdC. They are down to mag 10 and at the equator cover an area of 1 Hr RA and 10° Dec; this is scaled to cover an A4 sheet. The area I'm looking at for ease of scope position and sky conditions is 0° to + 60° - this will take 144 maps...  Most maps have several sessions in them and some a lot more; I'm never going to run out of things to see!

What strikes me though, is some areas are completely devoid of the features which allow you to find your way around. No bright stars, no asterisms, just a sea of random 5 mag and below stars. Made especially difficult because my 9x50 RACI struggles with the LP I have, making fainter stars difficult to see. Other than star hopping from familiar areas I don't know of a solution to this. Maybe I'll just give these areas a miss 

[Marvin Jenkins]

What a horrible problem to have🤣 I have a huge thunder storm brewing with at least 10cm of rain, giant hail and 90kmh winds.

I wish I had a boring mag 5 area of sky to look at. You have my unending support😂

Marv

[westmarch]

When I am trying to star hop through these areas, I tend to switch to my 40mm EP to use the fainter asterisms and continue to star hop. It also counteracts the LP.  You do need something like Sky Safari to display fainter star asterisms and flip the field of view.

John

[StarryEyed]

As Westmarch says, I star hop with skysafari and being just inside the M25 I often end up dead reckoning. I do find skysafari really good in this respect by getting the screen at the same scale as the eyepiece I cant star hop with the straight threw 30mm finder. Having an Alt Azimuth mount makes this a lot more intuitive and the thrill of actually finding the target this way always makes me smile. But I often look at sky safari and then the eyepiece and think  there are no stars in the sky. 

[Pixies]

On 04/06/2022 at 13:39, Mr Spock said:

I don't know of a solution to this

Dare I say the G*T* word?  

[Jiggy 67]

Your problem maybe crying out for a telrad with a deep sky atlas like the Interstellarum (for which i made a template). Widen your field of view to take in some easy to find stars and take that RACI out of the equation.........though, I suspect you've already considered that

[Mr Spock]

12 hours ago, Pixies said:

Dare I say the G*T* word?  

Don’t be rude 😜 The whole idea of a Dob is to get rid of all that faff. 

[cloudsweeper]

6 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

Don’t be rude 😜 The whole idea of a Dob is to get rid of all that faff. 

........ unless you specifically buy a Dob on a GoTo mount!  😉

I too get frustrated by the lack of guide stars in certain areas, so the Celestron GoTo saves me a lot of bother.  Apart from the 8SE Cat that the mount came with, it also takes the small frac (ED80) and even the 102S (as long as I don't send it to high alt).  Oh the joy!  And did I mention the tracking?

Doug.

[Paz]

I have all my scopes/eyepieces and finders set in sky safari so I can replicate any view easily in the field, I can rotate/flip any view to match the orientation I have at the time and adjust it to show exactly the magnitude of stars I can see.

I will use a 6x30 finder most of the time for the extra fov but if I'm going to be in darker areas I'll use a 9x50.

I will use the scope itself as a finder when necessary.

If I am going for  targets where the finder gets me straight onto them I'll use a raci finder as it's easier, but if I know I'm going to be doing some of the finding work at the scope then I'll use a mirror diagonal so that the orientation in the finder is the same as at the scope to reduce the confusion.

Sometimes I hop following the most obvious stars, but when it's sparse it can be useful to line up with the nearest visible star that is at the same bearing or altitude as the target and then slide straight across or up/down even though it may be a leap across the dark. This works well too with an equatorial mount but there I line up based on celestial up/down and left/right. However I find alt/az generally easier for finding things manually.

Most of the time I move carefully with slow motion controls but if there's a big leap to be made sometimes swinging the scope back and forth by hand until I get lucky gets a quicker result than than crawling to a target.

[Spile]

When the RACI runs out of steam I revert to the eyepiece and inverted view in SkySafari.