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Norton’s 2000.0 edited by Ian Ridpath, Longman, pp 179, Pounds sterling

IT’S the most battered book on my shelves, and well overdue for retirement.
The covers are only just hanging on, the spine has long since gone, and
many pages are beginning to take their leave. But 25 years of everyday use
would take their toll of any publication. And the fact that nothing has
taken the place of Norton’s Star Atlas in all that time demonstrates its
invaluable role as a general guide to the sky.

When Arthur Philip Norton originally published his atlas in 1910, it
was far from being the first set of charts of the sky. But previous maps
had shown either too much or too little. Professional astronomers used charts
that each covered a small region of sky; amateurs were presented with sky
panoramas that showed only the brightest stars, linked into constellations.

Norton, a schoolteacher and an amateur astronomer, divided the sky into
only eight sections, and on each he plotted all the stars visible to the
unaided eye. The success of this format led to 17 editions.

Along with the maps, Norton’s has always included a ‘reference handbook’,
to guide the amateur. The original author was a contemporary of Norton,
the Reverend James Gall Inglis. The information published has grown with
each new edition, as Gall’s successors have updated the handbook. While
the text in my edition of 1964 retains a characteristic Victorian charm,
later editions tried to catch up with the times, and never quite succeeded.
At many astronomical meetings over the past few years, amateur astronomers
have shaken their heads and exclaimed: ‘We need a new Norton’s’

And here it is – the first total overhaul of a familiar friend. Let
me say at once that it is a complete success. Ian Ridpath, a well-known
astronomy writer, has enlisted the aid of both professional and leading
amateur astronomers to produce an up-to-date atlas that still retains the
advantages of the original Norton’s, its unique style of maps and its practical
handbook section. Although it is listed as the 18th edition, for continuity
with a great tradition, the new Norton’s is sufficiently different to merit
its own title and a fresh review.

In the previous few editions, the handbook section has drifted off towards
astrophysics; now it appears once more as a compact and accurate guide to
the practicalities of observing the sky. For example, Ridpath describes
the pros and cons of the different kinds of telescope available today (including
binoculars, the most useful of instruments to start with). He provides a
succinct overview of the basics that fix our view of the sky: the date,
the time, sunrise and sunset.

Ridpath’s team tells us how to observe – and photograph – virtually
everything that the sky has to offer to the amateur astronomer. You don’t
need any equipment (apart from a warm sleeping bag) to watch out for meteors,
while a reasonable telescope is essential for observing details on the planets
and for picking up faint ‘deep sky’ objects such as nebulae and distant
galaxies. Binoculars or the smallest telescope are perfectly suitable for
finding your way around the Moon, or for measuring the changes in the brightness
of variable stars.

Fortunately, the star maps themselves still follow Norton’s original
format. But they, too, have been updated. For the purist, they now all conform
to a particular mapping projection (Lambert’s azimuthal equivalent) because,
as Ridpath wryly puts it, ‘Norton apparently plotted (them) on a modified
globular projection of his own devising’.

Over the years, the stars all apparently shift across the sky, as the
Earth’s axis gradually swings around in space. Ridpath has taken this chance
to update all the star positions from their positions in 1950, as shown
in the last edition, to 1 January 2000 (which, as the title indicates, is
2000.0 in astronomers’ jargon).

Anyone who totally revises a successful title does, of course, risk
losing some of the good points of its predecessor. My main grouse with Norton’s
2000.0 is that you can’t fold the maps out flat. They run across a double
page spread, and the unsympathetic binding means you lose the stars near
the equator of the sky. The faintest stars are also too small to see clearly.
In addition, I pity anyone who tries to read the names of the Moon’s craters,
printed in black on a dark grey background.

For as long as I’ve been in the field, Norton’s has been the bible for
amateur astronomers. This new edition has ensured that they will have an
authorised version for years to come – and that my trusty old edition can
now be happily put out to grass.