Forewords & Introductions
Reading the Night Sky
The beautiful clear night has once again enticed you outdoors to stargaze. But tonight is different. Far from the city lights, the sky has a slightly unsettling presence. Here, toward the west, a bright star draws your attention. And there, in the south, a few twinkling stars outline a huge geometric shape against the dark sky. But how can you find your way around in this multitude of stars? How to recognize the constellations? In your exploration of the fascinating beauty of the sky you feel overwhelmed and you can't get your bearings. It seems impossible to name the heavenly bodies and, especially, to describe them. Twenty years of sitting "face to face" with the sky have led to the creation of
The Concise Atlas of the Stars to help answer these questions and many more. Since classical celestial cartography makes reading the sky a complex task, we have removed everything that is not directly related to stargazing -- each star map is reduced to the essential. Reproduced on transparencies, simply lay the diagrams over the beautiful photographs taken by Japanese astronomer and astrophotographer Akira Fujii to find your way around the starry sky.
It would take more than a lifetime to explore the entire sky, and such an endeavor is far beyond the scope of this book. As such, we have concentrated on only 15 of the total of 88 constellations. However, they are those easiest to observe on a clear summer night, and among them you will find the brightest and most interesting celestial objects. For each we have developed an "ID card" that outlines their specific features as we know them today.
The Concise Atlas of the Stars beginswith the most famous constellation, the Big Dipper. Once you have found it, it will help you explore the dome of the sky throughout the summer months by following the slow, apparently clockwise movement of the stars from the early evening, through the middle of the night and into dawn. Although most of the constellations described in this book are visible in the northern hemisphere, some of them -- Sagittarius and Scorpius, for example -- are much easier to see in the southern United States and in the tropics. Finally, a few magnificent constellations, such as the Southern Cross, the Centaur and Carina, are only visible from tropical or southern latitudes.
The Milky Way, our galaxy, alone contains more than a thousand billion stars, and the visible universe contains more than a hundred billion galaxies. The Concise Atlas of the Stars will not provide a complete and definitive mapping of every star in the universe, but it will provide simple signposts for identifying the most beautiful celestial summer landscapes. If these pages help you recognize some stars in the sky the next time the night is clear, and if, night after night, you become more familiar and at ease with the constellations, then we have achieved our goal.
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