Night Sky Atlas: The Moon, Planets, Stars and Deep Sky Objects

Affordable simple astronomy atlas for beginners and amateurs. It has colorful diagrams and the best of all is the sky chart with the corresponding photograph of the sky. The skychart and photo are scaled 1:1 and it gives you a good impression of what to look for. This is great because in the real sky, you don't get lines drawn on the constellations. The real pictures are really good. Very detailed pictures on the moon surface including where indication on where the moon missions landed. The descriptions are not as detailed though. I would not say that this is the ultimate atlas or guide. This was written for hobby astronomers with simple telescopes, but even if you have a 8-12 inch scope, this is still a good sky road map but may be missing some deep sky objects that most of us will never see with low powered scopes. For the price, I will give it 5 stars

This is a very nice first atlas. It starts with a introduction section which covers the basics on celstial movement, observation techniques, and a few pages on the planets and the moon (including 4 pages of charts on the moon's four quaters and 4 accompanying pages of descriptions of each). It then has a very nice sky atlas section with the left page showing a black star on white background atlas and the right page showing the same view with white stars on black and all markings removed. This is helpful for getting a good idea of what you'll see, but the stars are artifically enlarged to show magnitude differences so its not exactly what you'll see in the sky. My one gripe about this atlas comes in the third and final section on individual constelations. Its very well detailed and uses a page or so per constelation with textual descriptions of various objects, a few photographs, and a finder chart. However, the charts are printed with yellow stars on blue background, which washes out quite horribly when used outside under a red light. A white light only fares slightly better. I've found that this section is best used indoors. You can use many available software pacakages to print finder charts that are more exact to what you're looking for and will display better outdoors. Overall, a very good buy.

I have many Astronomy books, but this is one of my favorites. The atlas is a classic star chart of an area of the sky, and on the next page is a photo of what you can expect to see. No more looking at your star chart, and then looking UP to try to find what you're looking for. It's so cool, and makes finding deep sky objects (or whatever your fancy) much easier. The back of the book also shows each constellation, and has a list of interesting objects in each with pictures that are stunning. Lots of great reference data also. Highly recommended and a GREAT PRICE too !!!!