You can download back issues of Sky and Telescope as PDFs at least as far back as January 2011 if you have had a continuous subscription to the magazine since that time. I believe this collection extends much farther back, but that is when I renewed my subscription after a lapse of about 20 years.
I would like to get as many years of back issues as I can since I am constantly encountering people citing articles from years ago -- but Sky and Telescope is not selling them in any form currently.
They used to have a collection for sale, but was a browser-based scheme only for Windows (I do not have a Windows computer), they have not offered it for years, and I contacted them an got a response that there were no plans to ever offer it again.
It appears that you can download back issues only for the years of your current subscription. Attempts to reach back to the era of my earlier subscription did not work (and it may be that the downloadable collection does not extend that far back). I have tried contacting Sky and Telescope offering to pay for subscriptions to earlier years at the current rate so that I can access those issues -- but got no response. Not too surprising -- the idea of subscribing to past years of a magazine is no doubt too mind-blowing for the subscription department to contemplate.
If someone who has an on-going subscription that starts earlier than my current one I would like to make some sort of arrangement to get copies of the issues before January, 2011. Maybe I could make a donation for the value of those issues to some entity?
