I’d like to set up a pretty long sequence of variable stars for weekly monitoring and would rather not have to enter the RA/Dec information manually. Looking through the SGP Manual shows that I might be able to Import the target names and coordinates from an exported Starry Nights’ observing list. Of course I don’t have Starry Nights, but looking at its manual says that the exported observing list is a tab delimited text file and it should be fairly easy to duplicate it on my end IF I knew what the structure was.
Anybody know what the how many and what the exported fields in a Starry Night exported observing list are?
TIA
Answering my own question…
I got a Starry Nights Observing List from a friend. After looking at it I was able to re-create it using Excel. Sixteen columns of data are needed. The object name goes in the 1st column (A), the RA goes in the 12th column (L), and the Dec goes in the 13th column (M). RA and Dec don’t need special formatting… 08 24 32.4 is fine. The other 13 columns can be blank. Sort it into the order you wish it to be in.
Highlight, copy, and then paste to a text editor like notepad and save with an .txt extension.
In SGP go to File/Import Targets/Starry Nights and find the txt file. SGP will go to work.
If you get fewer objects than expected you probably are missing some tabs in the file.
I now have a sequence of 50 variable stars to monitor…cool