Star Hopping Guide to the Messier Marathon

Each year in the new moon in March amateur astronomers trek out to dark sky sites to take the opportunity to see all of the Messier Objects in one night.

A Marathon is great experience that can really help a beginner learn to efficiently use his scope. That was certainly my experience. Yet many beginners quake at the prospect of traversing Virgo. It basically comes down to not having the correct tools. This book will supply all of the charts required for a beginner to complete the evening. Many of the charts will prove useful for finding the Messier objects during the rest of the year as well.

Don Machholz's The Messier Marathon Observer's Guide and his book The Observing Guide to the Messier Marathon  are the gold standard for information on the Marathon. This work is intended to supplement those works. The object orders and many of the star hops are taken from the former.

Why produce another guide when there is so much information already available? In 2004 I was getting ready for my first Marathon. I bought Don's book, but after some practice sessions decided that it was not enough information for a beginner to successfully complete the marathon. The finder charts in Don's book are small. It lacked the detailed charts necessary to navigate Virgo. Finally the directions in Don's book are optimized for using a German Equatorial Mount. For example, his directions for locating M37

From M35 go 3.7º preceding W and 8.2º preceding north to M37

are easily translated into actions using a GEM. Using an Alt/Az mounted Dobsonian such directions where less useful. I realized that what I needed was a set of overview and detailed charts that are optimized for star hopping to the objects. Using my Planetarium program SkyMap Pro I created a detailed script for the evening. I could zoom out for overviews, yet when it came to Virgo I had a detailed script that contained finder fields of view (FOV) and specific star hops that I could just execute. This paper converts that work into book form.

I have also included a chapter for beginners on how to Star Hop.

After several tries I was unhappy about the quality of the charts included in the Word copy of the document. I also received a number of requests for a book of only the charts. To address these problems I broke the document into two pieces;

Modern tools do allow you to follow the field of view of say a finder as you move the view of the program so while not providing the advanced planning they do allow you to track your field of view as you progress.

The chart only book will be easier to manage at the eyepiece. For a more experienced star hopper it will be all they need.