How much of a star chart appears in your eyepiece? You’ll be lost until you know. These form the same, familiar constellation patterns as on a naked-eye map. But step back for a minute, squint your eyes, and look at only the brighter stars.

The smaller Pocket Atlas, with stars to magnitude 7.6, is an excellent low-cost starter and all you'll ever need for binoculars or a telescope of 3-inch aperture or less.ĭetailed, zoomed-in star charts may look terribly complex at first. It covers the celestial sphere in 26 big charts that plot a total of 81,000 stars (to as faint as magnitude 8.5) and 2,700 other objects. Using A Star Chart at the TelescopeĪ standard atlas for serious telescope users is Sky Atlas 2000.0 by Wil Tirion and Roger W. In addition to a wide-scale constellation star chart, a telescope user needs a more detailed, magnified sky atlas in order to locate specific points of interest. If you don't know where Japan or England are, you need to learn.īut once you've found England on a world map, it's not much good for getting you to a particular street address in Tunbridge Wells.

Think of your all-sky star chart as like a map of the world, and the constellations as countries. An all-sky constellation star chart (such as the evening chart in the center of Sky & Telescope every month) will get you started. Click for larger view.īy the time you set out into the night with a telescope, you should know the constellations well enough to find your way around the sky. Amid swarms of details on Sky Atlas 2000.0, the naked-eye stars of Gemini are connected here to form their familiar stick figures.

Finding sky