I saw a previous thread from 1 year ago talking about adding planets to custom observing lists. I would totally love this. Any updates? I’d also love to see other targets that I can add such as double/triple stars. Is there a way for users to help contribute to build the database? I understand planets can be tricky, but double stars which remain at the same coordinates wouldn’t be much different than the existing targets.
Would be neat to let users rate each target 1 thru 5 for visual, and a separate rating for AP. That way we can filter by rating and see the most popular stuff.
I also noticed that if you click, “Copy to other lists”, you are able to continuously add duplicates of the same target to the same list. It doesn’t show you the check mark next to the list to let you know it’s already in the list. Totally minor… just mentioning it in case this wasn’t known.
That is all. Thanks so much for keeping this site up and I’ll go back to making lists. I only have 20 minutes until its dark enough for the real fun
I’d be happy to help build a list of double stars if you’d like to add this new category for visual astronomers. I love looking at the popular ones through the eyepiece when they are overhead. I would just need to know what format you’d like the list in and then I can get to work and hopefully you can integrate it into the website.
RE: more targets, I’ve been building a new targets database for a while now, which will be the base for the upcoming version with offline capabilities. In that database I’ll include planets, comets and asteroids instead of having 3 different pages for them. Hopefully the search will be much easier that way.
RE: let users rate each target for visual or AP, that’s a bit tricky, because that depends on the equipment used big time! Maybe include which aperture was used for that rating? I’ll think about it to see what we can do.
RE: copy to other lists, nice catch! I’ll see what I can do about this
The thing with SIMBAD is it has a lot of errors! Unfortunately there is no single source of truth for deep sky catalogs. There are a lot of mistakes and conflicting information all around. I’m trying to build a new targets database deduping and fixing this kind of problems - it’s quite a challenge!
Hopefully I’ll be able to release something in the coming months. Stay tuned
Thank you for your offer! I have a list of multiple stars ready to be added, but simply put, I didn’t want to work on the old targets database - that will be deprecated/deleted when the new one is out. Instead, I’ll add them to the new database after the first version is ready
Ooh, I love the idea of offline capabilites. If you add an ASCOM telescope chooser and put a GOTO button along with each target, I think my life will be complete, haha. I use my observatory for outreach and imagine being able to have my custom Telescopius list showing on the PC and just having the observers click GOTO on the target they wish to see?
