The Great Atlas of the Stars

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. Millions of nameless stars hang above the landscape like puppets in a shadow theater. 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, velvety sky.

But how can you find your way around in this multitude of stars? How to recognize the constellations? How far away is that star? Why does this one have an orangy tinge and that one look bluish? In your exploration of the fascinating beauty of the sky you feel somewhat overwhelmed because 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 in all the corners of our blue planet have led to the creation of The Great Atlas of the Stars to help answer your questions. Since celestial cartography, a science as ancient as humanity, makes reading the sky a complex task, we have removed from The Great Atlas of the Stars everything that is not directly related to stargazing. The connecting lines of the constellations, for example, represent simplified star alignments used by today's amateur astronomers to orient themselves in the sky.

The Great Atlas of the Stars begins with the constellations that are visible in the spring in the northern hemisphere. The northern spring sky is dominated by the famous constellation of the Big Dipper. Once you have found it, it will help you explore the dome of the sky night after night, by following the slow, apparently clockwise movement of the stars with the seasons. Although most of the constellations described in this book are visible in the northern hemisphere, some of them -- Sagittarius, Scorpius, or Canis Major, for example -- are much easier to see in the tropics. Finally, a few magnificent constellations, such as the Southern Cross, the Centaur or the Keel, are only visible from tropical or southern latitudes. Be sure to pack your atlas of the stars if you take a holiday on a tropical island!

It would take more than a lifetime to explore the entire sky. So we have concentrated on 30 of the most beautiful and well known of the 88 constellations. Among them you will find the brightest, most magnificent stars and the most interesting celestial objects. We have developed and "ID card" for each of these celestial bodies -- nebulas, galaxies, star couples and clusters -- and outlined their features as we know them today: distance, luminosity and dimensions. Three or six celestial bodies have been described in detail for each of these 30 constellations, so that you can identify all the most beautiful stars visible to the naked eye.

With a curious mind and a bit of training on how to observe the night sky, you will be able to go beyond the most common observation of the Milky Way to explore more unusual cosmic sights. As they are sometimes invisible to the naked eye, you will need a pair of binoculars or an amateur telescope to view them. This is the price of admission to see the most amazing and exotic celestial objects -- previously hidden star couples, nebulas illuminated by stars-in-the-making, and distant galaxies separated from us by millions of light-years of emptiness and darkness. Since the study of the stars by both professionals and amateurs, often arises by from profound personal questions about the universe, we have chosen to describe a few phenomena that continue to fascinate astrophysicists -- colossal stars, giant black holes that engulf distant stars and galaxies located on the outer edges of space and time. These phenomena, which can only be seen with the most powerful telescopes on earth, will be there, but they will remain invisible in the darkness in the field of your binoculars, hidden behind the dark clouds of the Milky Way or lost in the immensity of the cosmos.

Finally, to bridge the gap generally experienced between abstract astronomy charts and the true starry sky, The Great Atlas of the Stars is illustrated with magnificent photographs of the constellations taken by Japanese astrophotographer Akira Fujii. For the first time we have reproduced these images in large format so that the constellations -- which are pictured here as they appear to the unaided eye or with binoculars under perfect observing conditions -- are represented on almost the same scale as the celestial models.

Of course, The Great Atlas of the Stars cannot claim to be complete or exhaustive. The Milky Way alone -- our galaxy -- contains more than a thousand billion stars, and the visible universe contains more than a hundred billion galaxies. But we hope that we have succeeded in presenting simple signposts for identifying the most beautiful celestial 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.

Serge Brunier