Pocket Sky Atlas by Roger W. Sinnott

Before this pocket sized atlas, I've a DeepMap 600 as my field guide and I've a SkyAtlas 2000.0 for planning at home. Frankly, DeepMap 600 is kind of too simple and due to the aspect ratio, the shape of the constellation is not that intuitive; on the other hand, the SkyAtlas 2000.0 is too complicated with too much detail, way more than my instruments and I could manage, and of course, it's huge to use in the field.

So you know what I'm going to say about this Pocket Sky Atlas... yes, it's the best for both world. If you have only moderate equipments like 5-8 inch aperture telescope under light polluted sky, that's what you will want. More detailed charts are not going to be very useful.

Technically speaking, it's more like a scaled down and dumbed down version of the SkyAtlas 2000.0. However, given my situation (equipment + sky), it is just even making it more useful by removing unwanted detail. Of course, it still contains some stuff which I could never see from my sky, but they're always good for me to try in case the sky got darker due to weather changes, or when I travelled to darker places.

Each page is covering a good portion of sky, and each pages have sufficient overlapping so that you could move across the pages easily without being lost among the dots. There are four close up charts for interesting areas.

In short, this is currently the only chart which I will use both at home and in the field. Of course, but if you have better sky and better equipments, you need a more detail chart.

Having said that, I think this book can be made a little bit bigger, say like the size of a notebook, or at least A4 size. You know, we usually bring along a computer and it's nice to have a book which can be sneaked under it. Bigger page is always desirable, and I believe A4 or around the size of a notebook PC should be great. And it would also be nice to have a few more pages of close up charts.

The Sun by Steele Hill and Michae Carlowicz

I have more time to observe and to write these days, and therefore, other than all the previous topics, I will also start writing about some books that I have on my book shelf. This is the first one of this series.

Being an active solar observer, I really wanted to buy some related books from the first day. However, this kind of books is very limited and some really good and informative books were no longer available. Without too much choices, this is the first one which I bought. I got it from Amazon.



This is not exactly a technical book. You know what, I believe most more technical but still "amateur" books are out of print. This book is not really for active amateur solar observer, but it's more for general public who has interest on the sun.

The content is more like a coffee table book with many excellent photographs. The text is simple and nicely written.

Chapter one is called the Sun King. It talks about how important the sun is to the Earth, along with many excellent photographs related to this topic. Chapter two is called the tricks of light. It's about the atmospheric effect on sun light. Expect beautiful photographs of rainbows, solar halo, sun piller, green flash and their descriptions. Chapter three is called "I'll follow the sun", it's about how people from ancient time to modern days response to the sun. Chapter four is about auroras, to make it short. Chapter five is to look at the sun from the point of view that it is our star. I believe amateur solar observer will interest in this chapter the most. The next chapter is about space weather, i.e. how the sun could affect our life. The final chapter is called "beyond the sun" and you can guess what it's going to discuss about.

After all, it's a very good book to introduce the sun to your friends, or to get you interested about the sun.