Quote:
Originally Posted by Merlin66
Better than sliced bread!!!
Highly recommended.
I've had MANY atlases over the years and the only two worthwhile keeping are Nortons Star Atlas and Uranometria.
(I found my "detailed" atlases were superceeded by the UCAC catalogues in CdC)
|
I'm with Ken. When I started looking around the night Sky in the 1970's, I used Norton's. It is a great scale for wide sky navigation, good to get you to the vicinity if you are star hopping then go to a better scale. A Japanese engineer, Toshimi Taki, produced a set of charts at a similar scale to Norton's which he called Taki's Star Atlas. The PDF's are available at A3 but I printed out and laminated an A4 set which I find convenient for field use. Sometimes I just don't want to kill my night vision looking at an ipad screen any more than I have to.
The specifications are :
(1) Projection: Modified Transverse Mercator Projection
(2) Number of Charts: 12
(3) Scale: 3mm/degree
(4) Map Size: A3
(5) Magnitude of Faintest Star: 6.50
(6) Multiple Stars: Minimum separation 0.5 arcsec
(7) Variable Stars: Maximum magnitude 6.5, Minimum amplitude 0.4
(8) More than 500 Deep Sky Objects
- Galaxies: Magnitude up to 10.0
- Open Clusters: Magnitude up to 7.0
- Globular Clusters: Magnitude up to 10.0
- Planetary Nebulae: Magnitude up to 11.0
- Bright Nebulae
- Dark Nebulae
- Supernova Remnant
- Objects in Caldwell catalog are labeled.
He also produced a second atlas, a more detailed larger scale set that goes down to mag 8.5 stars and fainter DSO's. However it has a lot of charts and printing and laminating would be a big job.
Charts for both atlases are downloadable as pdf's. You can edit these in Photoshop or any image editor if for example you want to plot the path of a faint transient object, asteroid, comet on the chart or if you want to invert the tone, white stars on a black background like the Tirion Field Atlas.
Both Atlases can be downloaded from :
http://www.geocities.jp/toshimi_taki/atlas/atlas.htm
Joe