>Mr. Dillion wrote:
>This is an ongoing topic on amastro, with very frequent attention to
>specifics. Murray Cragin, editor of Uranometria 2000, camps out on
>there. As you probably already know, BC, UM2000 has the most accurate
>charting for DSO's of any source, by magnitudes of accuracy.
>According to what I read of Murray's comments, among packaged
>software, MegaStar's latest version is the busiest about following up
>on Steinicke's corrections. But for data, v. 3 of UM is the thing,
>and v. 1 & 2 have by far the latest updates for charts anywhere, so
>they'd be your resource when The Sky is off.
>I know paper is horribly Pleistocene and low-tech, but for my money
>I'll take the accuracy.
Hey JD,
If you look on page 1 and start reading paragraph 5 of your horribly
Pleistocene and low-tech copy of UM2000 you will see why it is so accurate.
Can you say MegaStar? Can you say DSS?
For those of you who may not have UM2000, the position of all the DSO's were
plotted and positioned using a modified version of MegaStar and the Digital
Sky Survey. Mr. Bonanno, the creator of MegaStar, modified his program so
that he could bring up one of the DSS images and then move and rotate the
DSO symbol to match what the DSS image showed. Basically when the symbol was
manipulated so was the underlying data in MegaStar. So I would guess that
the newest version of MegaStar ought to be just as accurate UM2000 since the
underlying data is the same.
Ain't technology great...
Rashad ( the geek ) Al-Mansour