By Mike Hotka

At the end of last month’s article, I left you driving home from your observing location after a successful night of observing. Now I’ll discuss what I do after I get home. I have a few more tasks to do before I consider this observing session complete.

The first thing I do is to log all my outing’s observed objects into my Standard Edition of SkyTools 4 (ST4) (SkyTools 4 Standard Edition (skyhound.com)) database. First, I open the observing list I was working on during the outing in the main ST4 display:

I highlight an object I observed during the outing (the blue highlighted area). In this example, the double star Gamma Her is selected. I can either, hover the cursor over this blue, highlighted area, and click the right mouse button to select the Create Log Entry choice in the pull-down menu, or I can just press the hotkey m to add a new log entry. In either case, the following input dialogue window will be displayed:

I then verify/adjust the fields of the Date, Local Time and Instrument (arrowed) to match the Gamma Her observation’s data and click the Create Log Entry button at the bottom of this window. The following window will pop-up, allowing me to verify a log entry was properly created for this object:

Close the Observation Log window and the New Log Defaults window and this object is now in the ST4’s database as observed. I repeat these steps until all the objects I recorded in my field logbook are logged.

Then I open a blank Microsoft Word document and transpose all the text notes from my field logbook into this MS Word document. An example page from my logbook is displayed below:

Once I am done entering all the text from every logbook page of this outing into the MS Word document, I print a hard copy of these observing notes. I then can add any sketches I did in the field logbook to the corresponding printed pages. The below example is the finished, printed page of the above logbook example:

I punch 3 holes in these pages and put the pages in a 3-ring notebook for future reference:

A few years ago, I started a second 2-inch binder of these printed logbook pages.

Remember my goal of observing 10,000 unique celestial objects?

With all my observed objects now recorded in ST4’s database, I can measure the progress I have made towards completing my observation goal. I use ST4’s ability to count the different class of objects. I click each class of object and enter the number of observed objects into an Excel spreadsheet I use to support my observing goal.

Once I am done with entering all these class object counts into the corresponding cells of the spreadsheet, it automatically calculates the current number of unique celestial objects observed (count circle in red in the below image):

I can easily see the progress I have made towards completing my observation goal.

Now I am done with this most recent observing session. With all these observations logged in the ST4’s database, I can start planning my next outing of objects I have yet to see.

This process I describe in last month’s and this month’s articles is a process I’ve developed over the years. I described it in detail so that you might adjust my process, or create a process of your own, that will work for you. Regardless, you need an automated way to keep track of what you have observed, and depending on your astronomical goal(s), to summarize these observed objects in a way that you can see the progress towards completing your goal(s).

An alternative to using ST4 to record your observed objects is to use an Excel spreadsheet. This kind of spreadsheet can contain all the objects you wish to observe and with embedded equations, can easily calculate the number of objects observed.

My current observing project is to view double stars. I have accumulated a total of 3965 double stars I will observe. I still use ST4 to log a record of my observed stars, but I also keep a separate Excel spreadsheet of the many double star lists I have accumulated over the years. The bottom of this Excel spreadsheet double star list is as follows:

From the above spreadsheet image, you can see an equation for the number found in cell B3970. Almost all the numbers in the summary lines 3970 to 3977 are driven by counting whether there is a date value in column A and whether there is a Y in columns H to M. In this one spreadsheet, I can monitor the progress of the Mitsky Double Star List, the Astronomical League’s Binocular, Advanced and Telescopic Double Star observing programs, the Multiple Star observing program, and the 500 best William Herschel double stars he monitored in the late 18-th century.

I added this Double Star Excel spreadsheet example to illustrate how an Excel spreadsheet might be used to record you observed objects instead of a program like ST4.

I am sure there are other alternatives to ST4 or an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of what you have observed. Whatever you chose, I think it is important to know what celestial objects you have observed over the years.