A decent star atlas is obligatory if you want to observe deep sky objects. It offers a nice glance on which objects are available for observation, and an easy way of star-hopping to get to the deepsky object. When I started astronomy at the age of 13, I bought myself the Will Tirion Star Atlas 2000. It was a book with 8 pages of star charts up to magnitude 6, and an explanation of every constellation in the sky.


Magnitude 6 is rather limited - if you have a small telescope, you'll quickly find stars up to magnitude 8. Luckily, there are some astronomers who have published some star atlases online :

• Toshimi Taki's star atlas offers 12 printable A3 pages with stars up to magnitude 6.5


• Andrew Johnson offers 20 A4 printable pages of star atlas up to magnitude 7 (18000 stars), available in black & white, or in color.


• And finally, Toshimi Taki also has a star atlas up to magnitude 8.5, offering an impressive 150 page atlas, covering 88000 stars.