Software for creating custom star charts
Chartmaster, named after the superb Starmaster line of Dobsonian telescopes, is software designed to help users create custom star atlases. These star atlases can be used a guidebook in the field for discovering objects to observe. Unlike users of GoTo & PushTo telescopes, users of fully manual telescopes cannot predict, a priori, how easy or difficult it shall prove to be to star-hop to and find a given target. This makes the usage of pre-planned observing lists very difficult - it is not uncommon to get stuck on finding a single target resulting it a complete derailment of the observing plan. Instead, it is far more productive and fun to simply find objects on a star atlas that are close to the current pointing of the telescope & to then star/galaxy-hop over to those objects. A problem that arises from this method is that of selectivity - suppose the (long-term) observing goal is to observe all the Herschel objects in the sky, how does the user identify (using an atlas) which objects are Herschel objects as opposed to the rest of the NGC? What is called for is an atlas dedicated to the observation of the Herschel objects. Fortunately, such an atlas already exists - the Cambridge Atlas of Herschel Objects. There is also a dedicated double-star atlas - the Cambridge Double Star Atlas. But what if the user is persuing an observing program dedicated to variable stars, carbon stars, or dark nebulae? No dedicated atlas exists! It is the hope of the author that this software will allow amateur astronomers to create thier own dedicated star atlases.