Norton's Star Atlas

Norton's Star Atlas is a set of 16 celestial charts, first published in 1910 and currently in its 20th edition under the editorship of Ian Ridpath. The Star Atlas covers the entire northern and southern sky, with accompanying reference information for amateur astronomers. The charts used in the first 17 editions of the Atlas were drawn by a British schoolmaster, Arthur Philip Norton (1876–1955), after whom the Atlas was named. Norton intended his star atlas to be used in conjunction with the highly popular observing handbooks written by the British amateurs William Henry Smyth and Thomas William Webb, and consequently most of the objects featured in those guidebooks were marked on the charts. The Atlas also found favour among professional astronomers, earning it the reputation of the most widely used and best-known celestial atlas of its day.

Norton’s Star Atlas became highly popular because of its convenient arrangement of dividing the sky into six vertical slices, or gores, like portions of a globe. Each gore covered 4 hours of right ascension, from declination 60 degrees north to 60 degrees south, drawn on a projection specially designed by Norton. The north and south polar regions of the sky were covered by separate charts on a standard azimuthal equidistant projection, extending from the celestial poles to declination 50 degrees north and south.

For the first edition, Norton based his charts on the Uranométrie Générale star catalogue compiled by the Belgian astronomer Jean-Charles Houzeau. Constellation boundaries were represented by dashed lines meandering between the stars, for no official boundaries were then established. For the 5th edition of the Atlas, published in 1933, Norton completely redrew the charts, despite now suffering from severely impaired vision in his left eye due to a blood clot behind the retina. This time he used the Harvard Revised Photometry catalogue for the positions and brightnesses of the stars. In this 5th edition the Milky Way was included for the first time, and he incorporated the official constellation boundaries that had been laid down by the International Astronomical Union in 1930.

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