--- Mark Wagner <mgwagner@No-Spam> wrote:
> Another fun one is Tom Lorenzen's 1001 something or other. Hey...
> Richard... what's the name of that atlas / reference. It was great.
Yes, I've heard of it. I'll have to look it up.
> >Over the years, one of the things I've learned to do with these
> >lists
> >is to avoid one of the major "rookie" mistakes -- doing the lists >
>in RA order
> Funny - I do them in RA! How do you do them?
I should have said "strict RA order" or "naive RA order". Maybe I'm
the only one dumb enough to have actually done this. I'm sure you
really do them in what might be called "sophisticated RA order", which
takes into account relative locality and also doing the more Southern
ones first, because they will be gone sooner.
The problem with strict RA order, which became obvious to me only after
my initial rookie year(s) is that you keep bouncing wildly North to
South, with the resulting telescope movements, chart page flipping,
etc. Not to mention losing the leverage of having the immediate local
"knowledge" of the area you've just hopped around. It finally dawned
on me after about the 10th time that I went from object A to B to C and
found out that objects A and B were in the same field of view, but
object C was 90 degrees away from them! It takes some people longer
than others to learn these lessons, I guess.
> >or, as one wise TACO once called it, "search and destroy
> >astronomy"
> Who'd ever come up with such an unappealing phrase? ;-)
It's a phrase I'll never forget, my friend. It lingers in my mind as a
reminder of several lessons, including the astronomical equivalent of
"stop and smell the roses".
Bob J.
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