U2000.0 All Sky Ed. Review

[Shark Bait]

I am very tempted to buy a copy of the new URANOMETRIA 2000.0 DEEP SKY ATLAS, ALL SKY EDITION. At $99 (Bintel) it appears to be better value than the cost for the earlier two volume editions. Having Northern and Southern Hemispheres in one volume is a bonus as well.

For those on IIS who have it:

Have the publishers removed any of the content when compared with the previous two volume editions?
Thanks,
Stu.

[Shark Bait]

I did a search using Google and this excellent thread turned up on Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews. Thought i'd add it to this thread for anyone else who is considering buying this combined atlas.

Starman 1 states:

I received it yesterday.
1) It's thinner than I thought it would be.
2) The 22 page star atlases in the front of each of the separate volumes are gone.
3) The index tabs at the edges of the pages are gone!!
4) The Common Names list is no larger than before.
5) The transparent overlays are gone!!!!!!!

Essentially, it's the same. If any refinement of positions took place, it isn't mentioned. The only thing I'll really miss is the Edge-of-Page tabs.

It's definitely more cost effective that getting the 2-volume set.
But no tabs? No transparencies?

And in another post he adds:

I just checked--the transparent overlays in the 2nd Edition work perfectly in the 1-volume atlas.
So someone who owns Edition 2 can choose to take eaither set to the field.

And:

I'm looking for a galaxy I haven't seen before, but is in my list "To Be Observed".
I use my DSC to dial in the location.
I see a field of 7 galaxies.
Which is my target? Let me look in U2000 to see...
Hmmm. It's 41 degrees north and about here in RA, flip, flip, flip.
Ah, there's the page.
Now, let me see....
Ah there's the group of galaxies I see. Ah, my target is the one on the right.
Let me get my note pages......

The ability to find the object quickly in the charts is paramount. Having one volume instead of two is great, but I will miss the declination tabs because I used them all the time.

So I don't systematically view every object on a page. I view objects from a pre-planned script. Uranometria helps me identify the target when it's in a crowded field, which seems to be happening more and more as the targets I seek get fainter.

And:

The format works fine--the same as the separate volumes.
The binding is heavy paper sewn into signatures and very well-bound.
It stays open when you open to a page, though near either end of the book the pages tend to not lie flat. It helps that the first chart is several pages into the book.
The charts go from left of left page across the binding to right side of right page. They do not fold out.

The charts are surprisingly uncrowded, which is the plus side of the mag. 9.75 limit. There are some large scale charts with stars (in some cases) to mag.15 in the back of the atlas, but if the atlas had been that scale it would have been 4000+ pages.

One criticism leveled at U2000 is that with 30,000+ thousand DSOs, the magnitude stellar limit is not deep enough to allow identification of an individual galaxy in crowded regions, and that is more-or-less true. There may not be any stars within the field of view of the galaxy in your scope that are plotted in U2000. But the alternative is either a lot more crowded pages (see the mag.13 atlas in the "Tri-Atlas" of Torres) or a larger scale, with a correspondingly more-difficult-to-use format.

These days you can always print large scale charts with stars to magnitude 16 from any one of innumerable free computer atlases if you need to identify several faint galaxies in a small area. Though, I've found U2000 adequate in many star-poor areas to identify the arrangement of galaxy groups so that I can make notes about the objects.

The new atlas is less than twice as thick as each of the two volumes in the earlier edition. The Deep Sky Field Guide (orig. Vol.3) still applies to the new printing and so is still a good reference volume for the atlas.
I miss the index tabs for the RA and Dec, but I like the one-volume arrangement.