POCKET
SKY ATLAS
Reviewed by Bob Sherman and Rob Lambert
If you want to do any serious observing of the night sky, you must have a first-rate sky atlas to guide you on your search for celestial objects. Many fine atlases exist, but we think we may have found one that will come closest to meeting your night-by-night needs.
The Pocket Sky Atlas, produced by Sky and Telescope is a wonderful little sky guide when you are out under the stars. It provides 80 main charts that contain 30,796 stars down to visual magnitude 7.6, roughly five times as many as you can normally see with the naked eye. Because all of these stars are readily visible in a low-power finder scope, they are helpful benchmarks and patterns for star hopping to any object of interest. The Atlas’ General Index lists 1,500 deep-sky objects including all of the Astronomical League’s Herschel 400 observing list. There are separate indices for the Caldwell and Messier objects.
After determining which constellation or part of the sky holds your object of interest, it’s easy to determine which chart you need. This Atlas has a chart key on the back page to help you find the specific chart you need and it numbers every map page so you can find your way around the book without getting lost.
The Pocket Sky Atlas gives you so much information to use, like its “Guide to Constellations” and “Greek Letters on Charts”. All maps are color coded and have a chart legend to help guide you to what you are looking for in the night sky. It also has a close-up chart section on the most observed regions of the sky. One chart that Bob personally likes is the Virgo Galaxy Cluster close-up chart. He’s spent many hours observing all the galaxies there. This Atlas helps the user separate and identify the many galaxies in Virgo.
This Atlas is 6 inches by 9 inches and fits in your glove compartment, so you never have to leave it at home or forget it when you are going to spend a night under the stars. It is reasonably priced at $19.95, making it an indispensable tool that everyone should have in their kit bag. You can order the Pocket Sky Atlas directly from Sky and Telescope by clicking on Books under Shop at Sky at http://skytonight.com.