Sortable Messier List

[JamesF]

Doubtless it will turn out that someone has already done this better

To get practice using my scope I've decided to find as many Messier objects as I can, starting with the easier ones. Whilst I like to plan targets for my evenings viewing sometimes the weather intervenes forcing last-minute changes and I thought it would be useful to have some idea of what I might be likely to find where. My scope isn't exactly the largest either and despite the relatively dark skies I have the good fortune to enjoy, finding something of 9.5 magnitude on a night when the seeing is a bit rough is likely to be a waste of time and just lead to frustration, at least until I've got a bit of experience and am getting used to relating charts and so on to what I can actually see in the sky.

So... I thought it would be handy to have a list of Messier objects that I could sort by both magnitude and constellation. There's a nice list on Wikipedia, but it won't quite sort how I'd like so I decided to do it myself. Perhaps most people would drop the data into Open Office or Excel and do it from there, but I'm no spreadsheet-jockey so instead I went massively overkill with a database and web page that does just what I want. I realise that apparent magnitude isn't the entire story with galaxies and clusters, but I can work on that.

Anyhow, in case it's useful to anyone else, the table is at www.fidell.co.uk -- Messier Object List

When I have a few more minutes I'll add the common names, RA/DEC and angular dimensions.

James

[Mark at Beaufort]

Hello James - have a look at this as well.

Mark

[chard]

That's going to be really useful for me. Nice work.

Straight into my astro bookmarks. Thanks James.

[Demonperformer]

James

Attached is a copy of the spreadsheet I use.

As the year rolls on I move objects to the bottom of the list and update to the next year's best date. This way I always know what objects are coming up to their best.

[tomw28]

Thanks for these! That first ones probably my favourite though.

Tom