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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The deepest readily available paper atlas, January 20, 2002
I guess I'm old fashioned when it comes to using a telescope, but I prefer a paper atlas to laptops and software star atlases. And I also prefer star-hopping to using GOTO or setting circles. If you're like me, you already know you're buying this massive work. Yes it's expensive. Yes it weighs about twenty pounds. But it's the ultimate paper atlas for the star-hopper. The three volumes (each covering eight hours of RA) together have over one million stars plotted on their pages!The binding and paper are of superb quality, sufficient for this atlas to actually be used out in the field! Unfortunately, after you see how pretty it is (and remember how much it cost), you'll probably be content to let it sit safely on the shelf to be used as a reference. Personally, I use an 8" Dob and hence generally observe objects bright enough for Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000.0 to be an adequate atlas. I have taken the MSA out a couple times but it was overkill. For owners of larger scopes who wish to go after the fainter DSOs, a Mag 11 atlas like the MSA is a bare minimum. A computer atlas going down to Mag 13 or so would be even better, but if you like paper then the MSA is the way to go. I eventually do plan to make heavy use of the MSA out in the field, but probably not until I get a larger scope. The closest competition to the MSA is Tirion's Uranometria 2000.0 2nd Edition. Note that although it doesn't plot anywhere near the number of stars the MSA does, Uranometria plots three times the number of deep sky objects (30,000). Therefore, owners of very large telescopes may be better served with Uranometria since it plots the very faint DSOs that MSA skips.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Millennium Star Atlas, June 8, 2000
The best description is a Massive Three Volume Set. This is a great Atlas - The organization is much better than Uranometria and the print and sizing of the stars is much better. This may not be the most practical at the telescope atlas but it is printed on high quality paper and the books do open and lay flat. I find this atlas very useful for going after the small faint stuff where you have to know the star patterns to ID the fields.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's what an atlas should be, June 30, 2006
Given that this atlas is the first to show stars to 11th magnitude, it is a pleasure to see it so well executed.
Each of the three volumes covers one gore (strip of sky from pole to pole) of 8 hours of right ascension. This arrangment has the advantage of keeping the part of the sky visible at a given time in the same volume.
Roll the drums! Write the headline: someone in the star atlas business actually gets the message. Sequencing charts in ascending right ascension is backwards. After decades of frustration, users finally have an atlas with charts sequenced in descending order of right ascension. One has to try it both ways to appreciate the difference. In atlases with north at the top and charts in ascending order, users are constantly fighting against their instinct as to which way to turn the page on reaching the edge of a chart. But in the Millennium, the user who reaches the right edge of a chart simply continues rightward to the next page; from the left edge, leftward to the previous page. This arrangement makes navigating the charts so intuitive that within the gore the numbers of adjacent charts at the left and right edges are unnecessary and have been omitted. Atlas writers who unthinkingly follow the tradition of ordering charts in ascending right ascension should take note.
Charts are clear and detailed without being crowded. Top and bottom of each page give the numbers of the adjacent charts; this greatly simplifies navigating through the atlas. A minor complaint is that adjacent chart information does not extend to charts in other volumes. Charts at the edges of a gore should say at their edges something like "Continues on Vol II Chart 235."
A measure of how good this atlas is is that other suggestions for improvement are merely speculative. The charts could maybe be bigger to cover more area and simplify navigation, maybe like the Sky Atlas 2000.0, but would bigger pages make the atlas awkward to use? Would they make it impracticable to print charts on both sides of the page? Numbered tabs for quick chart access are helpful, but are they practicable for an atlas which contains so many pages? Would tabs every 25 to 50 pages be helpful? Hard to say.
What is not hard to say is that this atlas is a superbly useful work.
It works nicely in combination with the Pocket Sky Atlas. Use the Pocket for quick basic finding and the Millennium for going deep in pursuit of the challenging stuff.
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