Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics , Edited by Paul Murdin IOP (Nature Publishing Group), Philadelphia, 2001. $650.00 set (3670 pp.). ISBN 0-333-75088-8(set)
This four-volume Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics summarizes a great deal of what we knew in the astronomical sciences at the most recent millennium. An associated Web site http://www.ency-astro.com may keep much of it up-to-date for years to come. The contents are extensive indeed: The index alone consists of 76 pages, each with three columns of fine-type listings, and there are “nearly 700 main articles” in the words of Paul Murdin, editor-in-chief. Murdin was assisted by editorial and advisory boards comprising 33 persons, most of them prominent astrophysicists but including the celebrated amateur astronomer Patrick Moore.
The main articles are what make the new Encyclopedia worthwhile. They are generally by experts, who took much care in their preparation. Impressive examples are “Stellar Evolution” by Jørgen J. Christensen-Dalsgaard and “Venus: Interaction with Solar Wind,” by Christopher T. Russell and Janet G. Luhmann. The degree to which the articles are illustrated and referenced, however, seems to depend on the inclination of the individual author. “Blue Stars at High Galactic Latitudes,” by John S. Drilling, is less than four and one-half pages long, cites nine works published from 1965 through 1998, but is not illustrated. “Proper Motion: Optical/Infrared,” by Arnold R. Klemola, runs seven pages, with two small geometric diagrams, six bibliographical citations, and a table of large astrometric catalogs with 20 footnoted references. On the other hand, articles on Saturn’s rings and its satellites are heavily illustrated, but with just two or three citations in each.
The coverage of solar physics is especially thorough. There are numerous articles on major topics, notably the physics and phenomena of the corona and the chromosphere, and some on more specialized subjects, such as “Polar Plumes” and “Coronal Cavities.” (The latter are not to be confused with the subject of another entry, “Coronal Holes.”) Finding all these articles is another matter; the reader is advised to make good use of that 76-page index. Although five main articles begin with “Coronal” and thus are grouped together, the main entries on coronal mass ejections or x-ray bright points, are in another volume, presented under “Solar Coronal Mass Ejections” and “Solar Corona: X-ray Bright Points.”
The economics of producing scholarly encyclopedias are such that contributors, if they are paid at all, rarely receive what their articles are worth. So the editor recruits only those articles that authors are willing to write. There’s no question as to the quality of the main articles in the Encyclopedia, but some obvious topics are lacking. There are cogent articles on “Dynamo Theory,” “Geodynamo,” and “Dynamos: Solar and Stellar,” but no survey of the important topic of planetary dynamos, although they are briefly mentioned under “Planetary Magnetospheres.” The work contains many superb articles on galaxies, but none on the low surface-brightness galaxies, which represent one of the hottest current topics.
The hundreds of unsigned shorter entries are a mixed bag. They range from seven lines on “Coronelli, Vincenzo Maria (1650-1718),” about the cosmographer from Venice who “made two beautiful globes for Louis XIV, 3.9 m in diameter, the biggest in the world until the present century … “ to “Black Hole,” about two-thirds of a page. They fall into various categories: Some provide simple definitions, as in entries on “Direct Motion,” “Rille,” and “Revolution,” while others give short descriptions of well known celestial sights—“Betelgeuse,” “Big Dipper,” and the constellation “Columba,” for example—or of important but not readily glimpsed astrophysical entities, such as the “Becklin-Neugebauer Object.”
Brief articles on observatories represent still another category. Some, as in “Beijing Astronomical Observatory,” include the URL of the observatory’s Web site, where more information is available; others, like “San Fernando Observatory” lack this helpful feature, although the observatory has an equally fine presence on the World Wide Web. Still other categories include very short articles on individual spacecraft and spacecraft series, individual annual meteor showers, and so on.
My concern about the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics centers on the short entries. The simple definitions are no more informative than those in such handy single-volume astronomy dictionaries as Jacqueline Mitton’s Cambridge Dictionary of Astronomy (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), which can be found on many an astronomer’s or science writer’s desk. Guess where I would look up those definitions: The entries on meteor showers, for example, “Eta Aquarids,” lack crucial details, such as hourly meteor rates and specific occurrence dates. Much more helpful information appears in tabular form in college textbooks and numerous publications for amateur astronomers. Entries on spacecraft are sometimes disappointing too: contrast the 15-word entry on “Dynamics Explorer (Explorer 62 and 63)” in this work with the illustrated, six-paragraph entry in Robert Zimmerman’s single-volume The Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space (Onyx, 2000).
The biographies of living scientists in the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics are rarely more comprehensive or detailed than those available from standard sources. You can’t be misled by the work’s four lines (and one word more) on “Rubin, Vera Cooper (1928-),” the contemporary investigator of velocity fields in galaxies, but neither will you be well informed on this much-honored astronomer’s accomplishments. The 21-line entry on “Sandage, Allan Rex (1926-) has no room for the famous controversy over the Hubble constant in which Sandage was a central figure, or for the discovery of blue stragglers, reported in his PhD thesis. In the latter case, fortunately, what is not mentioned in the biographical entry can be found in the main article, “Blue Stragglers.”
If this four-volume work were magically compressed into a single manageable volume, the myriad short entries would make more sense; the book would be “one-stop shopping” for astronomical and astrophysical reference reading. But since almost all copies of the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics , at four volumes and $650 for the set, will necessarily be found in reference libraries, why include the short entries? If you are in the library, it’s a lot easier to pick up a single volume appropriate to meteor showers, Mitton’s Dictionary , Zimmerman’s Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space, or a current college text. I’d still go to the library to consult the main articles in Murdin. They’re a splendid resource, but his Encyclopedia would have been more user-friendly if the short stuff had been omitted.
