The Space Library: Serge Brunier's Great Atlas of the Stars


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The Great Atlas of the Stars

by Serge Brunier, author and Akira Fujii, photographer

" ... Twenty years of sitting face to face with the sky from all four 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 line 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 Minor, 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 ... !"

- from the Introduction

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With The Great Atlas of the Stars, astronomer Serge Brunier and photographer Akira Fujii, have created a unique, stunning, easy-to-use book for amateur astronomers or anyone who has ever looked at the sky with a sense of curiosity and wonder.
This remarkable book shows how to identify the thirty major constellations and their component stars using mylar overlay transparencies for each constellation. Brunier took the time to tell SPACE.com about the inspiration for the book.

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SPACE.com: The Atlas is a beautiful guide to the night sky. What influenced the design of the book?

Serge Brunier: For years I've been fascinated with Akira Fujii's photographs of the night sky. In my view, he stands virtually alone as a photographer capable of capturing the night sky as it's seen by the unaided eye. Here in France I like to point out to family and friends the different parts of the sky: Here is this constellation, here is that star, and so on. I dreamt of doing a book for the general public that captured that feeling of having the stars pointed out to you by hand. His pictures allowed me to do that. I chose more than 30 constellations, and within each of these constellations, a number of objects visible to the naked eye, or with binoculars and little telescopes. In some cases I also chose things that are not visible, exoplanets, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, just to show people where these objects are in the sky. This was to illustrate how astronomy deals with the invisible. After that, the layout of the book was decided upon at a good fish restaurant in the Montparnasse part of Paris. My editor and I and a bottle of Pouilly Fumé! We decided on the big, coffee table format to give a scale to the pictures, than someone came up with the good idea to put transparencies over the pictures to illustrate the constellations.

Are you excited about the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera?

Well, I have wished for this for many years. I hope the Advanced Camera will be used to address the big cosmological questions: What is the exact age of the Universe? How and when were the galaxies formed? And what first illuminated the Universe, stars or quasars?

What is the most beautiful aspect to space?

I love the paradox of the Universe: the combination of intimacy and exoticism. Stars are very distant, but on the other hand, they appear so close. Though they're thousands of light-years away you can meet them every night from your window or your backyard. When you look at stars, you see others suns. The Universe is mysterious, but also understandable. This giant puzzle, with comprehensible rules, fascinates me.

What is your dream job?

My job. I have traveled the world for twenty years and met astronomers in the most beautiful parts of world: Under the clearest, darkest skies I have seen Saturn, with zero disturbance using a perfect Zeiss refractor. That was from the summit of Mount Paranal, in the Atacama Desert, in Chile. I've seen total eclipses of the sun in Hawaii, Chile, India and Australia. And I nearly touched the Milky Way on the slopes of the volcano Nevado Ojos del Salado in the Andes at an altitude of more than 6000 meters. I have met such marvelous scientists as Clyde Tombaugh, Fred Hoyle, Frank Drake, Halton Arp, Mike Shao, Buzz Aldrin, and so on. I cannot imagine another job.

What most inspires your writing?

Discoveries. I am happy to live in an era that has seen the discovery of gravitational lenses or exoplanets, for instance. An era that has seen nearly all the planets of the Solar System explored. When I began to be passionate about astronomy, the biggest telescope in the world was the Hale telescope of Mount Palomar! At the time, the furthest galaxy was about one billion light years away. Today that's next door.

Where in the Universe would you most like to travel?

Some years ago, I would have said Mars, but not today. I went to Mars, as we all did with Viking and Mars Pathfinder. I will go to Mars again next year, with the Mars Rover and Mars Express missions. I think robotic, and virtual exploration is the future of space exploration, not astronauts. Planet Earth is marvelous. I have a lot of people and stories to discover on this planet before to go the sky.

What most upsets you about science or scientists?

Regarding science, I'm afraid of the temptation to make a business out of the human body with genetics patents.

If you controlled a $1 billion foundation, what research effort would you fund?

Without hesitation, I would use $1 billion, or euros, to build a huge space interferometer: The Exo-Earth-Imager proposed by the French astronomer Antoine Labeyrie, who along with Mike Shao and Roger Angel in USA are the "spiritual sons" of Albert Michelson, the Nobel Prize-winning father of interferometry. The Exo-Earth-Imager would have 150 space mirrors, each three-meters in diameter, and would create a 150-kilometer virtual mirror. This big telescope would directly observe the extra-solar planets as easily as astronomers today observe the planetary bodies of our Solar system. For me, the discovery of others worlds is the really last frontier.

Why should we spend money on space exploration over research into deadly diseases?

I believe curiosity is what drives humanity. And from my point of view, science is the most beautiful human approach to satisfy this curiosity. Fundamental science is not so expensive, compared with the money spent in politics or advertising, for instance, or the money won just for hitting a tennis ball or kicking a football. A lot of money is needed for AIDS, Ebola, Malaria and other diseases. But we should ask people to contribute to that research before taking money away from space exploration.

What is the most vexing question in modern science?

I'm afraid I will not live to see the theory that dwarfs the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity: The theory that truly explains what really happened at the moment of the Big Bang. It could be String Theory, but it also might not be.