Yes, DSS is a wonderful thing.
My favorite way of downloading DSS images from the net is with my star-charting software
Guide 7.0 (www.projectpluto.com).
In Guide 7.0, you can zoom in on any section of the sky, and then from a menu ask it to
download the DSS image for the part of the sky you are looking at. It makes the DSS image
part of Guide's starchart, rotating and zooming it correctly. You can download as many
DSS images of the sky as you have hardisk space for. So Guide can act as a photo album
for DSS images.
DSS works really well for galaxies. I use to to check the location of UGC and PGC galaxies, many
of which have errors of several arcminutes in their cataloged location. Ive even found a few
NGCs that have been cataloged at the wrong RA/DEC.
DSS dosent work as well for planetary nebulae. For example M57 is highly overexposed.
It does reveal the rarely seen outer-halo of M57, but all the detail in the ring is lost. DSS
images is how I found the galaxy IC1296 (only 8 arcminutes from M57) which I now use as
a sky transparency test.
Make sure you have a big disk though. The online DSS image database runs of a CD-ROM jukebox
with more than 100 cds in it.
-ad
