Customer Reviews

The Night Sky 50°-60° (Small) Star Finder

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a durable and easy to use tool for identifying the night sky. Great for novices or seasoned pros. Easy to read with red light. I recommend the large version. Be sure to order the appropriate Latitude!!

This is quite a good star map, showing all the major constellations, the names of a few of the brightest stars and the locations of the Milky Way and ecliptic. There are also some extra dotted lines on it that I guess are to show larger structures that link constellations together, though oddly it does not show the very useful one of taking the last two stars of Ursa Major and extrapolating to the pole star (Polaris).

When I bought this I was mainly looking for a planisphere that fits in my pocket to help me recognise the constellations. This fulfills that need, though there are some ways it could be better. The two-sided projection of the sky to reduce distortion is a clever idea, but in the high latitude (50-60deg North) version I have, it means the back face only shows a small crescent of the low sky around the South direction. For high latitudes a conventional one-sided form might be better. Other planispheres sometimes have tables of the positions of the planets over several years on the back, which would have been a nice addition, whereas this one has no extended information at all, just instructions on how to use the planisphere.

The construction quality is OK, fairly good, though I'm worried the inner layer with the star chart is actually just card (although the outer layers are plastic) and I haven't tried it in very wet weather. The fact that it's a sandwich construction as opposed to two plastic layers in a normal planisphere also makes it a bit harder to turn. I also wish there was a version of this with luminous paper (OK silly I know, but still would be nice).

However, I could find very few pocket-sized (5" or less) planispheres on the internet in my latitude, and this one serves that purpose quite well. Four stars out of five.