At 15:34 13/09/2002 +0200, you wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>two parts to this message.
>
>1) Some of you may have read Sue French's Small Scope Sampler coloumn in the
>October S&T issue. She mention's a fine asterism named the Toadstool. I've
>been
>writing Sue about my own faviourite asterism, recently named Kemble 2,
>which may
>be found at 18 35 35.0 and +72 23 56 i Draco. Check it out and tell me which
>constellation it reminds you of :)
>
>Anyway, Sue mentioned that Kemble 2 was labelled as such in her recent copy of
>MegaStar. Now, Guide should really not be any worse off than the mentioned
>package, and hence I became aware of something which is indeed lacking in
>Guide: data for well-known named asterisms.
>
>Imagine someone wanting to find the Coathanger, Kemble's Cascade or the
>Toadstool. Guide doesn't have a separate DSO category for asterisms. I'd very
>much like to see one, as well as a fairly comprehensive dataset of named
>asterisms. The Coathanger is a border case, since it is actually a
>cluster, but
>it illustrates the broader issue of being able to find any object by way
>of its
>nickname, regardless of object type. Indeed, being able to do a cross-category
>search on nicknames is really one thing which would be useful.
>

Actually the coathanger is not a cluster. There have been many discussions
of this on amastro and the data for distances do not support this being a
true cluster.

As for Megastar V5 the asterisms are in a common names database that is
included with the program. This is an ASCII text file and has been added to
by the users of the software. As Megastar does not differentiate in its
search between types of objects there is just one of these common name
lists for all types of objects. There is nothing to stop someone adding the
asterisms to any of the Guide NSO lists.