While I own and enjoy using a 200 mm Dobsonian Telescope, I find myself turning more and more often to my 102 mm refractor or my 130 mm Dobsonian. Small telescopes can be lifted more easily, set up in the yard more quickly, and more easily moved to alternate viewing places in a yard full of shade trees. My Mag 7 Star Atlas is almost perfect for use with the big Dob, but it provides too much data for small scopes. With 17 full-paged charts and 17 double-columned pages of text, it is intended for use by experienced and enthusiastic astronomers using larger instruments.
The small scope user is best served by a monthly all-sky chart with appropriate data -- perhaps showing deep sky objects down to about mag 8. I've always recommended The Evening Sky Map from skymaps.com, and I still like it. But I recently discovered that Orion Telescopes used to publish a Monthly Star Chart that is even better. Unfortunately the Orion Telescopes has gone out of business and its maps are now offline. You can find six of them here. Note that, while the planetary and lunar data are now out-of-date, the charts are still useful for locating the stars and deep-sky objects.
I have condensed the data from my Observing Notes for the Mag 7 Star Atlas down to 4 pages of double-columned text, and have created a single pdf file that you can download and print. That way, you'll have all the data you'll need for a full year and all the information for those charts.
So here it is -- (click on the image of the small scope to open the PDF file of data for the Monthly Charts)
- You'll see that I have not included the sky maps themselves. I recommend that you go to the Orion website and download charts for January, March, May, July, September, and November. The stars rotate across the sky slowly enough from month to month that six charts are sufficient. Start here.
- Note that you can print individual monthly charts by editing the web address of the printer-friendly chart for January 2024. Change 01 in the address to 03 for March, or to 05 for May, etc. I assume that after 2024 you will also need to edit the year. Here is the address to edit:
- Because the Orion chart has so much information, you may need a magnifying glass to read it.
- I have included links to the best amateur astrophotographs of the various double stars and deep sky objects in the data lists. Instead of buying a nice Dwarf2 or SeeStar50 to take automated images, you can just enjoy those already made by others.
