Old vs. new Uranometria

Any thoughts on the old vs. new editions of Uranometria 2000.0? I must
confess I've found the new one a little hard to use because it's so
cluttered with 15th-magnitude galaxies!

But including atlases on more than one scale, in the same volume, is a great
idea.

Michael Covington wrote:

Any thoughts on the old vs. new editions of Uranometria 2000.0? I must
confess I've found the new one a little hard to use because it's so
cluttered with 15th-magnitude galaxies!

Cluttered? If you want cluttered, try some of the pages in the H-B Atlas. As
for the new version, I do not find it cluttered necessarily, but it does go a
little deeper than the old version and has a much-improved layout. I like it
a lot better than the old one, although with having my laptop and Megastar,
U2000 doesn't get nearly as much field use as the old version used to get.
Clear skies to you.
--
David W. Knisely
Prairie Astronomy Club: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org
Hyde Memorial Observatory: http://www.hydeobservatory.info/

**********************************************
* Attend the 11th Annual NEBRASKA STAR PARTY *
* July 18-23, 2004, Merritt Reservoir *
* http://www.NebraskaStarParty.org *
**********************************************

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 20:48:15 -0400, "Michael A. Covington"
wrote:

Any thoughts on the old vs. new editions of Uranometria 2000.0? I must
confess I've found the new one a little hard to use because it's so
cluttered with 15th-magnitude galaxies!

But including atlases on more than one scale, in the same volume, is a great
idea.

An ideal match for a 16"+ telescope, I would imagine.

Alan

An ideal match for a 16"+ telescope, I
would imagine.

Alan

I've never seen the new edition, so I can't contribute much to the
subject of the thread, but the old Uranometria is wonderful even for
smaller apertures. I don't think I'd reliably find at least half of the
objects I look for with my 8 inch SCT without it, and I even depend
heavily on it when using my 11x80 binoculars. In fact, while the dimmer
galaxies are out of the range of my binocs, the stars in that atlas are
a pretty good picture of the sky outside my house in those binocs.
Without all those stars to hop by, I'd be lost.
Marty

I think what happened to me was that I got used to one edition and then
anything else looked wrong.

I do wish the new edition had a larger minimum star size (because we want to
be able to read it in dim light) and not quite so many galaxies. Otherwise
it's great.

What I'd really like is Sky Atlas 2000.0 re-rendered as 6x9-inch charts with
considerable overlap, plus a larger-scale index map at the front of the
volume.

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:36:41 -0500 (CDT), (Marty) wrote:

An ideal match for a 16"+ telescope, I
would imagine.

Alan

I've never seen the new edition, so I can't contribute much to the
subject of the thread, but the old Uranometria is wonderful even for
smaller apertures. I don't think I'd reliably find at least half of the
objects I look for with my 8 inch SCT without it, and I even depend
heavily on it when using my 11x80 binoculars. In fact, while the dimmer
galaxies are out of the range of my binocs, the stars in that atlas are
a pretty good picture of the sky outside my house in those binocs.
Without all those stars to hop by, I'd be lost.
Marty

Yes, I see your point; but I was going by what one might expect
to readily observe. For instance, I wouldn't have even an inkling of
a chance of seeing those objects which Mr. Covington had
complained about, and with my 4" refractor...

....nor with my yet-to-arrive 8" reflector.

Again, and to elaborate, I see your point about the star-hopping, as
I would think it would be excellent for that very thing when looking
through the eyepiece and seeing magnitudes much fainter than
those nakedly-observable.

Alan

Actually, I've just come in from a session of using Uranometria 2000.0,
first edition, to star-hop with my old C5. It's fun to start somewhere and
just see where you can go. I came across a nice asterism or loose cluster
around and to the south of the star SAO 89834 near Mu Pegasi.

The telescope has almost exactly a 1-degree field with a 25mm eyepiece. It
matches the squares on the atlas.

Clear skies,
Michael

The FOV of my 11x80 binocs is just about 1/4th of a degree smaller than
the FOV of the finderscope on my SCT, so I can use the same acetate
circle to plan a starhop across the charts. I have those little
circles made for all my atlases. The Uranometria is the only one with a
large enough scale that I made one for the low power eyepiece of my SCT.
Marty

An ideal match for a 16"+ telescope, I would imagine.

Well Uranometria's kind of funny like that. The limiting magnitude on
DSOs is far greater than on stars. So though the selection of DSOs
may be good for a 16" scope, the plotting of stars is sufficient only
for a 6"-8" scope. This means that it can be difficult to star hop to
the exact location of a faint DSO, since the atlas doesn't provide
enough faint stars to pinpoint where it is. I prefer the Millennium
Star Atlas, which has a much more balanced limiting magnitude for
stars and extended objects. And a more comfortable scale to boot. Of
course, it's three volumes and twenty pounds in weight. Also, it
doesn't include a bright star atlas like Uranometria does, so you have
to supplement it with another atlas.

Ritesh

Ritesh wrote:
Well Uranometria's kind of funny like that. The limiting magnitude on
DSOs is far greater than on stars. So though the selection of DSOs
may be good for a 16" scope, the plotting of stars is sufficient only
for a 6"-8" scope. This means that it can be difficult to star hop to
the exact location of a faint DSO, since the atlas doesn't provide
enough faint stars to pinpoint where it is. I prefer the Millennium
Star Atlas, which has a much more balanced limiting magnitude for
stars and extended objects. And a more comfortable scale to boot. Of
course, it's three volumes and twenty pounds in weight. Also, it
doesn't include a bright star atlas like Uranometria does, so you have
to supplement it with another atlas.

I don't know if there's a consensus about this, but I think the
limiting magnitude on DSOs *should* be considerably greater than it
is on stars. I don't need every star I see in the eyepiece to be on
the atlas; I only need to be able to identify the field I've got in
the eyepiece.

Even the Millennium Star Atlas only goes to 11 (heh); that's less than
the limiting magnitude of a 60 mm refractor under dark skies. I think
Uranometria has enough stars for a user to locate most of the DSOs in
the atlas. The one thing that *is* hard to do is to distinguish some
of the really small DSOs from stars, but the stars you'd confuse them
with are not the 11th magnitude stars plotted in MSA--they're 14th and
15th magnitude stars that you'd need the GSC for. In other words, you
might need to use computer atlases to be sure you nailed them.

I really like the new U2K. Having said that, I must admit I often
don't take it out into the field. I end up using PleiadAtlas more
often that not, probably because I'm most familiar with it.

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt