The Star Atlas Companion is the ideal companion to any star atlas, as it is the first book to provide a true perspective on the characteristics and distances of over 1,100 stars and their movement through space. With the aid of scale diagrams, the reader can grasp difficult-to-understand concepts such as how far apart stars really are, their relative sizes, how fast they spin and their shapes, and how the constellation patterns change over time. This book:

- describes many stars visible to the naked eye in both the northern and southern hemispheres;

- explains binary and multiple star systems in detail;

- gives the properties of many open clusters;

- enables a true appreciation of the scale of our galactic neighborhood

About this book.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Making sense of the data.- The Constellations.- Andromeda to Chamaeleon.- Circinus to Indus.- Lacerta to Pisces.- Piscis Australis to Vulpecula.- Index.

Philip Bagnall, an amateur astronomer, has previously been published in The Meteorite & Tektite Collector's Handbook (William-Bell, 1991), and in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine on meteors. but he has also written on a freelance basis for various other science magazines including New Scientist, Focus, Earth, and Science PROBE! He is a former Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, former member of the British Astronomical Association, the Meteoritical Society, and the British Association of Science Writers.