> 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.
If you have used DeepSky stacker to stack RAW files, maybe you have notice that the resulting image is poor of color saturation. This is because it has a higher number of bits then the display could show.
Last test from passed night put an end of the questions witch is better CCD or CMOS. My old CCD K-m fall back compared to CMOS K-5.
HDR stands from High Dynamic Range. In short it is the number of tones that compose the image. The larger it is, the best capability we have to see details in the bright and dark regions of a scene.
Witch is better. Stack or long exposure? It depends…
NGC 7000, South America nebula in Cygnus, taken by me from NAO Rozhen. 2 shots composed by 45 frames @ 30s, ISO 51200 with SW 200pds and Pentax k-5. Same processing with DeepSky Stacker and LightRoom.