Stargazing - A Graphic Guide to the Heavens (2004) Part 1 How the Sky Works

On a crystal-clear evening, on vacation perhaps, how often do we contemplate the night sky and promise to learn the stars and constellations? Somehow, we never get round to it. Charts in newspapers look too complicated. Astronomical handbooks are equally daunting.

STARGAZING is the answer - the night sky simply and beautifully mapped, an animated stellar atlas that works from anywhere on Earth. Season-by-season, it signposts and explains. Little by little - like learning a language - the cosmos is comprehensible.

STARGAZING is a glossy work of reference that will last and last. Animated vignettes turn points of light - stars, nebulae, galaxies - into supernovae, flashing pulsars, searing quasars and rotating swarms of 150-billion stars with supermassive black holes at their centres.

The sky is viewed from three latitude bands - from the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere (Japan, Europe, North America), from the tropics, and from the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere (Australasia and southern South America). There are no “talking heads”, no interviews, no on-screen host.

Part 1: How the Sky Works

Getting to know the night sky. Why the stars and constellations appear to move across the heavens. The stellar formations always visible from the northern and southern hemisphere. How to view them through binoculars and work out their positions from a sky chart. Why the planets seem to wander against the sky background sky.