The Making of History’s Greatest Star Map , Michael Perryman Springer, New York, 2010. $29.95 (282 pp.). ISBN 978-3-642-11601-8
A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering in a New Era of Discovery , Ann Finkbeiner Free Press, New York, 2010. $27.00 (223 pp.). ISBN 978-1-4165-5216-1
Observational astronomy was once a science in which lone observers spent cold nights on remote mountaintops obtaining one spectrum at a time. The makings of two recent celestial maps exemplify a field in which scientists at their desks can access and process huge quantities of archived information on the internet and publish their results as teams of dozens. The new maps are even available to citizen-scientists, at least one of whom discovered an object not previously noticed by the professionals.
In the 1990s the European Space Agency’s High Precision...
