Night Sky: A View of the Heavens Kit

by Various and Barnes and Noble

Included in the kit: Basic star map, with the historical illustration in place. 32 historic full-color constellation cards with stars perforated. 64-page celestial guide book: Urania's Mirror, or A... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 076076168X
• ISBN13: 9780760761687
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Barnes and Noble
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

More beautiful than useful

This is a facsimile reproduction of the first American edition (1832) of Urania's Mirror, which was published in London just after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although it purports to be "by a lady" and following a "plan perfectly original", there is good evidence that it was created by a man and largely plagiarized from an earlier star atlas. But never mind that; the book and cards have been sought after for two centuries because of the beautiful paintings of the zodiacal and other figures that are used to illustrate the constellations. A quick web search will show the level of admiration of these works in the art world, with reproduction prints going for hundreds of dollars today. The fact that you can pick up the whole set for about the cost of a movie ticket is pretty amazing. The set includes thirty-two cards illustrating the major constellations visible from the Northern Hemisphere (keep in mind that this was written by and for British stargazers; if you live in Buenos Aires or Cape Town, some of these will not be visible!), a book that introduces the mythology and appearance of each constellation, and a planisphere (circular star map) to help you locate the constellations in the heavens. It's a nice set but if you strictly interested in it for stargazing purposes, there are some limitations that you should be aware of. In the original version the cards had punched holes over each star, so that if you held the card up to a light source you could see the appearance of the constellation as it would appear in the night sky. The cards in this reprint have been punched, but not punches through. I suppose that this is so people can frame the cards without have any ugly holes showing, but it means that if you want to use the cards the way they were originally intended to be used, you will have to punch out the chads. There are 32 cards and each card has between 20 and 100 stars, so this means punching out something like 1000 chads. Also, our modern light-polluted skies do not easily show as many stars as were visible even in London 200 years ago, so if you punch out all of the chads, you may have a hard time matching the constellations to either the sky or to other sky maps, atlases, or planispheres. Third, a few of the constellations have changed names in the intervening two centuries. Finally, the included planisphere is pretty but it includes only the brightest stars, and the art from the cards is printed on the planisphere so it is hard to make out the star patterns anyway. For all of these reasons, the set is not a good stand-alone resource for the beginning stargazer; you will need a modern sky map or planisphere at your side just to decipher the constellations as they are shown here. However, if you are a seasoned stargazer or have an interest in the history of astronomy or art, this set is beautifully made and a steal at any price I have seen put on it (usually $10 or less). As an astronomical toolkit I give it 3 stars, bu