A Comprehensive Field Guide to the NGC by Bhavesh Parekh
The speaker for Monday's July 19, 2021 meeting is RCA member Bhavesh Parekh. He is an avid observer and has been our liaison with Stub Stewart State Park for the last two years. Many RCA observers and imagers have spent productive sky-gazing sessions on the field with Bhavesh.
A committed Dobsonian telescope user, Bhavesh started down an investigative hole when some of his fellow observers began to think about reprinting an out-of-date book of the New General Catalog (NGC) objects. Like someone who starts to fix a door and ends up building a house, Bhavesh started down a creative and collaborative path that led to a result he wasn't expecting when he started. On Monday night he will discuss how he got started, what he found, why he decided to create something different, the problems he ran into, how he solved those problems, how he tested his field guide and why he chose the solutions he came up with. The goal was to generate a user-friendly resource for the observer and the imager. A Comprehensive Field Guide to the NGC is the result.