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Sky Safari 7 Pro event planner filter question (double star separation criteria affects all results)

Gsansoucie

November 20, 2022 16:05

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Came here looking for help on the Planner filter, specifically how the “Double star separation in arcsec” setting affects the overall filter.  Not finding anything in help or the community.

Looks like this becomes an “AND” clause under the hood when trying to filter.

I’m looking for all objects (sans stars and asteroids) within Pegasus but I want to limit double stars to a separation of 20” or greater since my scope and the viewing conditions at my house are very limiting.  When I apply this, I appear to only get double star results.  Messier and NGC objects that meet my other criteria are filtered out.  This limits the usefulness of this planner as I basically have to already know what other objects I want to view and add to the list.

Is there some way to apply the double star separation criteria only to doublestar entries so I get all other objects plus double stars within my criteria range?

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5 comments

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  Gsansoucie November 20, 2022 16:30

  Let’s see if I can add more details, including screenshots.

  I have a limited viewing site, my backyard in a city with trees, houses, streetlights, etc impacting my session.  For this reason, I’m playing around with this planner, trying to limit a session to a constellation and filter to the objects I care about and can realistically view.  Even with my TNV-14 setup, I’d like to cap out at Mag 10 for now (I can go much fainter but this is a test here).

  I like double stars, but would like to add to the observation list, only double stars with a separation of 20” or more (then I don’t have to change Eye Pieces as much in a session).  I also want Messier, NGC, etc DSOs like open and globular clusters as well as any galaxies I could view.  I’ve filtered out Asteroids but it’s off the screen shot below.  I’m showing this screen shot to see that I have selected double stars, open and globular clusters at the very least.  You can also see I’ve added an Alt filter for my neighbor’s house (which should be moot as all of Pegasus for the time I plan to view, 2100 local Eastern Time Zone in the US, is visible).  I’ve also capped the magnitude at 10.

  

  Here is my double star separation criteria.

  

  And my results which don’t include M15, which does match the other criteria.

  It pulls up 63 objects, however, they are all double stars.  Which leads me to believe that as soon as you add in the double star separation criteria, your filter is only on double stars now.

  

  
  And the bottom of the list.

  

  
  Is there some way to do a union here under the hood?  I want my viewing list to include everything that matches my criteria.

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  Gsansoucie November 20, 2022 16:36

  And if I go backwards, back to the same filter and clear or reset the double star separation to 0:

  

  
  I now get an overwhelming 340 objects (most double stars I cannot separate with my scope or any scope available to an amateur, even with the Night Vision gear):

  

  And way down at the bottom, I see that the three DSOs that met the magnitude criteria are in the list as expected:

  

  I guess I could make multiple lists.  But the fact that the filter screen makes it look like you can create a filter for a single list via the “object types included” setting at the top makes me think this is either a bug or I am missing a configuration setting somewhere,

   

  in the interim, I’m going to look for a way to combine lists.  In SS5 Pro, I made lists externally to the app and was able to import them.  Hopefully I can do that here too.

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  Gsansoucie November 20, 2022 16:49

  A follow up, as a workaround, I can create multiple lists.  However, in the observation menu selection, only one list can be be highlighted in the chart at a time,

  

   

  Which means, from a visual point of view, I’ll miss other DSOs (like M15 here).

  

  
  This is all a test, I know where M15 is and have sketched it a number of times over the years.  I’m looking for a way to use the tool here to create a single viewing session list which would be super powerful to me at least,

   

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  Gsansoucie November 20, 2022 19:21

  So I have a workaround to this issue,

  Create multiple observation lists with the various objects.

  Download each observation list (you can either email the list from the app or download from the free version of livesky).

  Make sure you are working with the skylist format and not csv.  The skylist format looks to be a legacy, multi line per object format used with previous versions.

  Open in your favorite text editor and combine each list.

  

   

  The name of the file will become the name of the list.

  Save the list to iCloud (if you are on a different machine, for text editing, I use my MBP).

  On the iPad, locate the file in iCloud, copy it local to the iPad (root is fine).

  

  Click on the file and it will now import into Sky Safari.

  

  As indicated and expect, the new list has been added to observation lists (you will create duplicates if you keep clicking the file).

  
  
  And the details are as I would expect the original query should have returned.

  

  
  So it’s a cumbersome workaround, but a workaround nonetheless. 
  
  

  By the way, when I combined the lists, I did not update any of the “DefaultIndex” values in the process.  All worked fine on the SS side.  I have or had scripts to handle this for a previous version, I didn’t think to use it here and looks like I’m fine.

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  Gsansoucie December 01, 2022 12:30

  Any update on this?