> Deep-Sky Hunter Star Atlas
http://www.deepskywatch.com/deep-sky-hunter-atlas.html This is an amazing resource. Detailed atlas of all the sky with NGC and IC objects. All stars up to 10th magnitude. It is more detailed then any of the software available so far. I use it to plan observations and locate fainter objects.
You can print it and have it in your hands. Such an old school feeling! :)
If you have PC on hand during your observation, other good resources are the astronomical databases such as SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ but you need to be more specific in what you are looking for and it is therefore for higher level use.
Another good and more popular resources are Word Wide Telescope and Google Sky. For Mobile, I use SkyEye a very nice app but it shows stars up to 6th magnitude.
Here is one of my shots of M22 Globular cluster in Sagittarius and crop of the same filed from the atlas. Shot is taken in "Kara Tepe" one of the darkest sky in Europe with 200mm f5 telescope and single exposure of 30s and ISO 25600. The smallest dot is a 10th magnitude star. You can see that on the actual photo there is countless stars much weaker then 10th magnitude.
As this is a part of the Milky Way the most fainter stars dissipaters in the noise grain. As stated in the previous article the fainter star is much weaker then the limited magnitude of my 200mm telescope and will go even to 16 - 18+ magnitude.
You no more need large sensors and heavy equipment to do good general photos. The recent development of image sensors put silicon chip capabilities to it's limit by
Knowing what you are looking for is more then half way to achieving it. Breakthrough Listen is a SETI kind of project that listen for artificial signals from 1700 nearby stars up to 160 light years.
Some shots from Sofia. A very bright sky place. Zenith sky brightness info (2015): SQM 19.13 mag./arc sec2 Brightness 2.41 mcd/m2, Artif. bright. 2230 μcd/m2, Bortle class 6.
It is very important how you manage your data. So much shots, so much frames. They are full of hidden data that could be revealed later. The far we look the more we see. Each feint dot could be a galaxy far far way.
Nowadays we are so into the globalization and technologies, that I can submit observation plan to a remote, professional observatory at the other part of the word!
