Deep sky with binoculars

Hi all --

I've had a difficult time relating what I see thru my binoculars (16x70's) to sky atlases. I have Sky Atlas 2000.0, Bright Star Atlas 2000.0, The Cambridge Star Atlas and the Edmund Scientific Mag 6 Atlas. With all, the problem is the scale of the images -- too much sky which makes small star fields too cramped to be useful.

For what it's worth, I've just discovered that I can come close to what I see with my binocs using Starry Night Pro by setting star magnititude to7.7 and verticle field size to 4 degrees.

My skies are fairly dark, not great. Anyone who tries this will have to find their own star mag settings.

Has anyone found another technique?

Bob Polcyn

Hmmm, I find Sky Atlas 2000.0 the easiest tool to use for binocular observing. And i do an awful lot of binocular observing.

edz

Bob,

Get yourself Karkoschka's The Observer's Sky Atlas. About a half of its objects could be glipmsed with binoculars (unlike SA2000 where the ratio must be 1:1000000), and the limiting magnitude is 9 - just right for binos.

Dmitri

I use The Sky v5 with the appropriate FOV indicators. The display can be set to whatever magnitude you like and various DSO's can be turned on or off to allow the marker star patterns to show. I use 16x60 Pentax's

It also works very well with the 9x50 finder on my 10" Dob.

A great piece of software that I've had for several years.

Pete