http://rasc.ca/handbook/

or 416-924-7973.

It will cost you 30 or 40 $US.

Half the data is ephemeral, that is its good only for the year of publication. The rest is useful tables and articles that are good forever. I highly recommend it.

It’s the best and most complete almanac availble for advanced amateurs. The serial# and unlock code you need to download ECU is printed in the inside front cover. Unfortunately, my number and code have already been “used up”, they are not transferable.

I have access to the data already, either through the internet or my own library of catalogs and atlases,
but this is a way to display it graphically. It also has a facility for connecting the software to new, or user-produced catalogs, allowing you to display your own objects onto the celestial sphere.

I’m trying to figure out a way to point it to the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars to generate a 3D geography of our corner of the local spiral arm.

Check this out, its a tremendous resource for amateurs with an interest in SETI! 3800 known stars within 200 light years.

http://migall.fastmail.fm/astronomy/stars_and_nebulae/CNS3/CNS3.htm

It already has access to the Tyco and SAO star catalog (down to mag 16) and the full version comes with the Principal Galaxies Catalog, so if you’re a galaxy freak this is definitely the way to go. Every star has a spectral type, so at a glance you have a lot of data available for tracking down faint fuzzies. ECU also has a red screen night vision saver. And of course, you get the NGC and IC, Washington Doubles and ADS variable too.

There is a good selection of Deep Sky Catalogs, but the full version comes with extra goodies like the Perek-Kohoutek Planetary Nebula catalog. It also allows you to link directly to the POSS online by just clicking on any object so you can see what it looks like.

You can also print charts, do solar system searches, and run your scope with it, but I have less use for those features. I use it as a supplement to my paper atlases and catalogs. It’s nice to point to some obscure mag 16 star or some anonymous galaxy and get a full page of data on it. That alone is nice to have.

I suggest you get the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Observer’s Handbook, which will give you access to a year’s use of the ECU software. It’s a good way to check out the software without investing too much in it. It is fast, and relatively bug-free so far. And you can’t go wrong with the RASC OH either, it’s a great litle item which I highly recommend.

I downloaded “Stellarium” onto my laptop. It’s free but a little buggy. I can take the computer out to the observatory and use the star charts. It has a night vision saver mode witch dims the screen and turns everything red.

A few years ago, I got StarryNights Pro 5 for Christmas. I used it to print out detailed charts for the evening’s viewing. It will also run your goto scope. Handy for staying indoors or in a warm room while photo guiding (which I don’t do}.

With StarryNights you can ‘fly’ anywhere in the universe in “spaceship” mode. It’s a hard to control simulator and gets old quickly. You can “goto” all the planets and their moons with a click of the mouse and you can “zoom” in on deep space objects.

Let me know what you think of the ECU. I might want to replace Stellarium.