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My Celestial Jewel Box – The Guy Pirro 888 Best and Brightest Deep Sky Objects in the Northern Skies

Posted by Guy Pirro 09/26/2024 03:40AM

My Celestial Jewel Box – The Guy Pirro 888 Best and Brightest Deep Sky Objects in the Northern Skies

This is my personal deep sky observing list. I use it to line up my DSO targets on any particular night. Over the years I’ve referred to an earlier version of this list in my monthly night sky postings on Astromart. During that time I’ve received a number of requests from readers to make the complete list available in one place, so here it is (updated) for your use and enjoyment. I hope you find it useful.


Comments:

THanks for this list. Any guidance on how to convert this into skysafari?
Surya:

I have not used SkySafari personally and am not familiar with how to program it, but a friend of mine showed me the app on his smart phone and I was very impressed with what he was able to do with it.

Creating on observation list for SkySafari varies depending on the version you are running.

Here is a link that provides detailed information on creating observation lists for the various versions of the app:

https://support.simulationcurriculum.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=how+to+create+an+observing+list&commit=Search

Hope this helps.

Let us know how you make out and please share your experience with the Astromart community.


Thanks,

Guy Pirro


Thanks for the pointer Guy, and thanks for the amazing list. I will post a link to skysafari file once I get that done.

Surya

  • Neptune [David Standen]
  • 12/24/2024 03:36PM
Guy, nicely done. Just a thought, add celestial coordinates for all 888 objects and send it into who ever bought out Willmann-Bell publishing (Sky&Telescope?) to get this published in a spiral bound format for sale.
  • lwbehney [Laurence Behney]
  • 05/21/2025 08:05PM
I second that idea.


  • lwbehney [Laurence Behney]
  • 05/21/2025 08:11PM
NGC 6709 aka your P1. Thanks for this list. If P1 is any indication, your list is excellent. I found a nice photo of this cluster in the garden astronomer website. It contains some nice colored stars, but beyond that, there is a very neat asterism near the center of it with two glowing eyes, a hat, a face, and a body. It's also a rich cluster. If you know, could you tell us how it came to be called Levy's cluster?
Laurence:

I'm glad you are enjoying this list.

David Levy is a prolific modern-day discoverer of comets, with 23 comets to his credit, either independently or together with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker.

He co-discovered the famous comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which in 1994 broke up and collided with the planet Jupiter.

Levy discovered his first comet in 1984, less than one degree from open cluster NGC 6709, thus the name "Levy's Cluster."


  • AstroDr. [Michael Prochoda]
  • 07/28/2026 06:37AM
Thank you so much for your list, Guy! I have observed many of these objects over the years, so I can attest to the quality and choices on your list. I don't know if you can attach files to posts such as yours, but a PDF or Excel version of your list would be very helpful for folks to download.
Thanks again!
Michael:

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad that you find my list useful.

I don't have a way to distribute pdfs to readers, but I can suggest two simple workarounds you may want to try.

1) You can cut and paste my list from the browser onto a word document and then create a pdf version of that

or

2) You can just print the article from the browser, but instead of directing the page to a specific printer, use the print-to-pdf option.


Hope that helps,

Guy

  • AstroDr. [Michael Prochoda]
  • 07/29/2026 08:11AM

@Princeton

Thanks Guy. As you mentioned I copied and pasted your post into a Word document so I can print it out for use while observing. Thanks so much for putting together this list!


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