My good friend Ronald Stoyan in Erlangen, Germany, is a one-of-a-kind expert deep-sky observer and publisher. Ronald has developed a new star atlas, called
Interstellarum, that will be a fabulous addition for deep-sky observers. You must check it out.
In Ronald’s words . . .
“I would like to tell you about
Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas (
isDSA for short), a major cartographic project I have been working on for more than 10 years. Finally, some weeks ago, the German edition was published. As there has been a lot of interest from abroad, we'll try to get an English edition running. As Oculum, my publishing house, is based in Germany, we’ll have to look for distributors in any overseas markets.
Bright stars are big dots, faint stars are small dots — this simple principle has been known for centuries. But on the real targets, the deep-sky objects, today's atlases do not give any information except size and elongation. Thus, from the map alone you'll not be able to tell whether you can see a given object.
isDSA is changing this — all deep-sky objects are shown according to their actual visual perceptibility (not total brightness!). This means at the same time,
isDSA is not showing objects that are way beyond reach of medium to large telescopes (as most other atlases do).
With a lot of other unique features, this is the first atlas that really has the deep-sky observer in mind. For more information, see
www.deepskyatlas.com.”