Favourites list?

[Fir Chlis]

I haven't found an obvious way to do this, but is there a way to have a Favourites list of targets?

The scenario I'm thinking of is if friends or family are around (or for a Star Party), I could have a saved list of targets that I know would impress them. If these were available in, say, a drop down list on the Goto Catalog Target page (like the current Messier/Caldwell list), then it would be quick and easy to find something good for them to look at.

And I'm maybe being very picky here, but a related nice to have would be a compass direction filter in the Messier/Caldwell list (and the potential favourites list). If the wind is strong, I put my telescope on the lee side of the house, which blocks half the sky, so it would be nice if the drop down list could be filtered to exclude objects that I couldn't see.

To be fair, I usually use Stellarium to look at the half of the sky that is viewable, so this latter thought is maybe a bit OTT!

Cheers


Geoff

[admin]

Hi Geoff,

the favourites list is a good idea - I also want to investigate having the search in the initial drop down search against the full catalog too, but not sure if that will work.

Not sure about direction - possibly, but I also have a plan to allow for custom horizon altitudes, so you could specify how high your horizon is in different directions. That would feed into the filtering by above/below horizon and time to set automatically, so you could set up a custom horizon to match your observing position. I guess that to support different locations there would have to be multiple custom horizons though...

cheers,

Robin

[Jean-Francois]

Hello Robin,

Do you have sufficient information for an user horizon file ?

For example, the programs Occult Watcher and Carte du Ciel (Skychart) have an user defined horizon.
You can see in the attachments 2 examples.

horizon_Geneve.txt

(614 Bytes) Downloaded 21 times

UserHorizon.txt

(6.63 KiB) Downloaded 18 times

The horizon file of Occult Watcher allows only integer values. The other software can use decimal numbers.

Regards,
Jean-Francois

[admin]

Hi Jean-Francois,

thanks for sharing - those look very similar to user horizon files that I have seen before in other software, so it seems that there is a fairly common format. Initially I was concerned that the calculation of rise/set times in bulk for a custom horizon would be too slow, but you can work out a table in advance of the hour angle of rise and set by declination then look up each object in that table rather than calculate individually. I am undecided yet on how to handle obstructions that stick up and cause objects to have multiple rise/set times per day...

cheers,

Robin