Extending SharpCap’s Annotation/GoTo Catalog
After you’ve done EAA for a while, and especially if you enjoy observing quirky or peculiar targets, you’ll find your software may not include your planned target in its GoTo catalog. SharpCap’s default catalog is smaller than some other packages (NINA and SkySafari 7 come to mind), and this problem is one of the reasons I started using NINA’s Atlas and framing assistant.
However, when I started observing Arp Galaxies, I found even NINA didn’t list a fair number of these targets. I was getting pretty frustrated until I learned that SharpCap’s catalog is extensible. Here is a Cloudy Nights Post which offers free downloads of the Arp, Hickson Compact Groups (HCG), and the Principal Galaxies Catalog (PCG) in SharpCap’s format.
It’s pretty straightforward to install an extension. You download the csv file correctly formatted and copy it to a file directory on the computer where you run SharpCap. Full instructions are here. You’ll need a SharpCap Pro license. You’ll also need to have configured SharpCap’s platesolving.
Just don’t go crazy. While the Arp (with 338 entries) and Hickson Catalog (100) are small, the complete PCG has something like 700,000 galaxies. If SharpCap needs to search them all, it will really slow it down. So add catalogs judiciously, or add selected subsets: for PCG, less than 18,000 galaxies are Magnitude 15 or brighter.
BTW, if you do have to enter coordinates manually into SharpCap, make sure you enter them as J2000. As long as they are J2000, SharpCap automatically translates most notations, including degrees/arcminutes/arcseconds or decimal degrees. See the following link for a post explaining the dos and donts.