Re: Is there some website that will allow me to plot star maps with labelled magnitudes?

allisonki@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am interested in observing some of the many Hamburg Quasar Survey
cataclysmic variables for which no AAVSO chart (or any other, as best
as I can tell) has been created. Is there some place on the internet
where I can create such charts? I would need a limiting magnitude down
to about 15.0 or so.

Hi, there, and one free program that will do this is fchart, which uses
the tycho2 database and has an option to set the limiting magnitude
separately for stars and deep sky objects.

<http://www.astro.rug.nl/~brentjen/fchart.html>

Just for fun, I generated a chart of M75 with a limiting stellar
magnitude of 15.0 and a 2.03-degree field (the FOV for one of my
eyepieces) with this command line:

fchart m75 -s 15.0 -f 2.03

You can chart a field of any desired size in degrees around any object
named in the databases (Messier, NGC/IC, and SAC), or pick any arbitrary
RA and dec as the center point. I wrote a review posted here earlier
this summer.

As with star atlases, stellar magnitudes are identified by circles of
different sizes, with a key at the bottom of a chart.

The recent outburst of HS2331+3905 (=V455 Andromedae) to 8th magnitude
suggests that monitoring of these objects might be rewarding, but the
lack of available comparison star charts is surprising, and a real
hindrance!

Since printed star atlases have a limit around magnitude 11, some
software solution is obvious. People like a variety of solutions;
for text-based Linux, I find fchart a really neat program.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@xxxxxxxxxx
Lat. 38.566 Long. -121.430


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