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Hi, I just wanted to share an experimental personal project that I started. I like to use my photos to study star atlases and the idea dawned on me that I can use my own photos to generate my own custom star charts. Basically, I open the photo in GIMP and then create a second white chart layer. I set the opacity of the chart layer to 50% and then draw the principal stars in GIMP over the photographic stars in the photo layer, along with objects of interest. Afterwards, I adjust the opacity of the chart layer to 100% and export to PNG, TIF and JPG formats. Finally, I import the image in LibreOffice and do some basic labelling before exporting to PDF format. I'm posting my first try here. In further charts, I would like to add image scale, direction and star magnitudes. Sure, I could use a planetarium program to print charts, but this project has a certain do-it-yourself satisfaction level. I intend to use these charts for visual observing. Here's the reference image that I used and the resulting charts from this process. Steven  Leo   |
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Another example, this time a simple constellation chart based on this image: Scorpius  |
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I tried another method, basically negating an image with some processing to bring out stars and applying basic labels. Here's the result. |
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I wanted to finish off this project with a few more finder charts that I created from my photos using the second method that I described above. The process works well, but in the interests of time, I kept the object labels to a minimum. Conceivably, one can create their own star atlas or star chart library this way. Here are the reference images and charts created from them:  The Andromeda Galaxy and R Andromedae  Eta Cygni  Cygnus  Backyard Milky Way     |
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| UPDATE: I downloaded my data and found solved images that saves me a lot of time. I used the data to create a customized star chart of the galactic centre and Cygnus Star Cloud. Here's PDF files with the unlabelled and labelled images: Galactic Centre Finder Chart.pdf Cygnus Star Cloud Finder Chart.pdf Here's the rest of the charts that I have created so far, fully manually: Antares Finder Chart.pdf Eta Cygni Finder Chart.pdf Gamma Cygni Finder Chart.pdf M31 and R Andromedae Finder Chart.pdf M65 and M66 Finder Charts.pdf NGC 7000 Finder Chart.pdf Virgo Cluster Finder Chart.pdf |
