When Will Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000.0 was published by Sky Publishing Corp
in the '80s, It immediately made all its predecessors obsolete. Sky followed up by releasing Sky Catalogue 2000.0 (Hirschfield and Sinnott), and both of these references quickly replaced Antonin Becvar's Atlas of the Heavens (AKA Atlas Coeli 1950.0) and its accompanying Katalog for most amateur astronomers. The Tirion atlas went deeper, was more complete and up to date, as well as having superior map projections. It also wisely reproduced Becvar's convenient overall format and high quality paper and graphics. Sky Catalogue is a masterpiece of compilation still widely in print today, a great improvement over the '50s era Becvar Katalog.

After I switched over, I relegated my old copy of Becvar to the coffee table, in spite of it's coffee rings, crushed bugs, cigarette burns, and decades’ worth of scribbled notes. After a few years, however, I came to realize the older atlas was still valuable in three aspects: first, many of my older references, such as Burnham's Celestial Handbook and the Webb Society Handbooks, often referred to the Becvar atlas and catalogue. Second, the atlas was gorgeous. The bold colors and presentation were esthetically (to me at least), prettier than the austere and muted style of Tirion. Lastly, Becvar was also notable in being the last star atlas to be produced by purely manual methods. It was a beautiful example of pre-computer uranography, graphic arts, and publishing and worth keeping for its own sake. It was also historically significant in that it was the first atlas/catalogue suitable for deep sky observers (an enormous improvement over Norton’s!) and detailed enough that it would still be useful to a serious observer today.

I decided to replace my beat up old copy with a new one, only to learn that Sky had totally discontinued the item in favor of the Tirion. I further learned that copies of the old atlas were not to be found, and unless I stumbled on to one at an estate sale or something, I wasn’t likely to locate it. Eventually I heard a rumor that International Star Registry had bought up Sky’s old inventory and was using them to identify stars they had renamed for their customers. I visualized a warehouse full of Becvar atlases being ripped up to provide one-page finder charts for people who had purchased obscure star names for their pets and relatives, and it broke my heart. The atlas had been compiled over the war years at Skalnate Pleso Observatory in Czechoslovakia by a dedicated group of astronomers and students under what must have been terribly difficult conditions and it was an artistic and scientific masterpiece. Surely, Becvar and his colleagues deserved better than this.

I decided I needed to rescue at least one of these volumes, so I bit the bullet and gave ISR a call. My plan was to offer to purchase a clean copy from them, and I decided to keep to myself my prejudices about their operation while I negotiated with them. I found that my telephone requests were treated very coolly, almost with suspicion. It was pretty clear they did not want to talk about it, and I was bounced back and forth to a variety of company officials before I finally found one I was able to convince that my motives were purely those of a collector and no threat to ISR and its commercial activities. He reported that all the old copies they had were “used up” and now they generated finder charts from other sources. I got the impression they were very sensitive about their business, particularly when talking to astronomers.

Eventually, I did locate a very clean used copy of Becvar’s atlas on the internet (with the help of friends here on HZ) from a library sale and it is now one of my most prized possessions. And I still have my original copy, with all it’s accumulated battle scars, which I purchased while still in high school over forty years ago.