from my own perspective, i feel that using the real sky atlas is better than the ones displayed on pdas and mobile phones when you are out in the field. The actual sky atlas allows you to see more at one time(larger field of view), so that you can navigate the sky with ur telescope with the surrounding stars guiding u before zeroing on the object u planned to see. Well, it's my own opinion though... so... others might not agree
Well, a real star atlas is rather troublesome to bring at times and since it's rather big, you can't really hold it up for long and view the stars at the same time. PDAs and mobile phones' star atlas would be very useful here.
that's when a chair or safari bed will come into use. harlequin will tell u how useful a safari bed would be, especially when there are > 2500 stars up there. =p
Anyway, i just bought a portable wooden chair from ikea at $8.90. It's super light.
I would like to share my experience. A good star atlas is very important to know where interesting objects are located in a particular sky region. I find that Bright Star Atlas is easy to use for me (a beginner) because there are lists of interesting objects (galaxy, star cluster, or multiple star) with short descriptions on facing pages, and the maps are not too detailed. Once, I know what I want to see. The PDA is used to aid star-hopping to the object. It can show telrad circles and compute the separation angle between a known star to the object. PleiadAtlas can show stars down to the 11th magnitude. The screen can be zoomed and oriented to match the view in a finderscope. So, I put my PDA on the finderscope for convenience. It works well especially for persons needing portability, IMHO.
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