ABSTRACT
Astronomical catalogs are an invaluable resource toto the astrophotographer. They are the à la Carte menu of the cosmos. One can easily imagine, although the first astronomers recorded the very brightest stars onto fanciful charts, as soon as telescopes were used to methodically survey the heavens, the number of objects increased exponentially. This created the need for systematic catalogs by type, position and brightness. One of the earliest catalogs dates from the first millennia and lists more than 1,000 stars in detail, and interestingly includes the fuzzy outlines of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud.
