Round the Year with the Stars: The Chief Beauties of the Starry Heavens as Seen with the Naked Eye

The charts illustrating this book have been drawn by the writer especially to meet the needs of beginners—of those who, feeling what a void in their intellectual life ignorance of the stars has created, would now fill that void, and thus round out their spiritual being with some knowledge of Nature on her most majestic and yet most beautiful and winning side.

On account of the necessarily diminutive scale of the charts, everything has been omitted from them which did not seem essential. But for the purpose in view they gain by this process of exclusion, for with more details they would have been confusing. It is the broad, general aspect of the sky with which the beginner must first familiarize himself. At the start the heavens appear to him to be filled with an innumerable multitude of scintillating sparks, scattered everywhere in disorder. But with a little attention he perceives that there is discipline in this host, and immediately the discovery gives him pleasure and awakens his admiration, as the perception of order always does. The great leaders of the firmament come forth, unmistakable, plainly recognizable, and thereupon the rank and file fall into their places. Then the ineffable beauty of the whole assemblage bursts like a revelation upon the mind. This revelation is not for the dull in spirit, but he who has once had it becomes henceforth, and even in spite of previous prejudice or indifference, a devotee of the stars, with a zeal flaming brighter with every swing of the pendulum of his years.

In the four circular charts representing the aspect of the heavens respectively at the Vernal Equinox, the Summer Solstice, the Autumnal Equinox, and the Winter Solstice, few stars fainter than the fourth magnitude are included, and not all even of that magnitude, because the sole purpose is to enable the beginner to recognize the constellations by their characteristic groupings of stars and their relative situations in the sky. The insuperable difficulty is to picture the hemispherical sky on a flat page. A certain amount of distortion cannot be avoided, and the reader’s imagination must supply the effect of perspective. He must always remember that the centre of the chart stands for the middle of the sky overhead, and that the circular boundary represents the full round of the horizon, from east through south, west, and north, to east again. If he is comparing the chart with the sky while facing south, he should hold the chart upright as it is printed in the book; if he makes the comparison while facing north, he should turn the chart upside down. If he lies on his back with his head to the north (and in no other way can one get so vast an impression of the starry dome), and holds the chart over his head, it will represent the entire vault of the firmament.

The names of the constellations will be found on the charts, and also the individual names of the most celebrated stars, but the constellation boundaries are not shown, because, in nine cases out of ten, the precise limits of a constellation are not important for the beginner to know, and to search for them would simply lead to confusion. As he progresses in his knowledge of the sky any uncertainty about the constellation to which particular stars belong can be settled by consulting the six charts, drawn to a larger scale, at the end of the book. On these charts more of the small stars are shown, and in addition there will be found the Greek letters which astronomers attach to the principal stars of each constellation for the sake of ready identification. On these charts, too, the constellation boundaries will be seen, indicated by dotted lines. The tracing of these lines is more or less a matter of arbitrary choice. There are no international boundary disputes among the heavenly powers, and the frontier lines may run anywhere, provided only that they do not include in one constellation any stars which by common usage, or prescription, belong to another. The constellations have been reshaped many times in the past. The “geography of the heavens” has known as many changes as that of the earth, the ambition of the old astronomers being sometimes as insatiable as that of founders of terrestrial kingdoms and empires.