books & beyond

All You Ever Wanted to Know

Encyclopedia of Astronomy
and Astrophysics
Paul Murdin, ed. (Institute of Physics Publishing
and Nature Publishing Group, 2001). 3,670 pages.
ISBN 0-333-75088-8 or 1-56159-268-4. $650.

related software. Many entries contain

references, cross-references, and/or URLs,
though Internet resources are not nearly
as profuse as I expected. The encyclopedias 75-page index alone, with some
20,000 entries, would be enough to gain
it a key spot in my workspace!
As youll see, I believe this encyclopedia
sets a new standard for astronomical publishing, one with a unique twist that Ill
get to toward the end of this review. Its
technical and literary quality is superb,
due, of course, to the hand of its editor in
chief. Paul Murdin, of Britains Particle
Physics and Astronomy Research Council,

a well-known author himself, knows what

it takes to get the job done right.
My census uncovered some 625 authors, including many big names. Their
national affiliations provide a telling statistic: 52 percent make their living in
North America, 40 percent in Europe, 6
percent in Australasia, and 2 percent
everywhere else. Now you know where
the action is!
So, what do we find between Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory and ZZ
Ceti Stars? Since I dont have the space to
tell you, I decided to review one item in
depth. In a rush of extraordinary creativ-

Review by Leif J. Robinson

S&T: CRAIG MICHAEL UTTER

n an era when everything seems

overhyped or overblown when you
can get a medium soft drink at a
burger joint but not a small its refreshing to find a product that exceeds
your expectations.
If youve read the bibliographical
blurb above, you already know that the
Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics is huge, 3,670 (quarto) pages. To
put this new work into perspective, its
first predecessor always at my fingertips
was A Concise Encyclopedia of Astronomy
(1968), containing 368 octavo pages. It
was little more than an overambitious
dictionary. My favorite since 1992 has
been The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia with its 1,002 quarto pages.
Impressive acceleration, yes?
The real issue, of course, drives to
usefulness. How does the Encyclopedia of
Astronomy and Astrophysics measure up
with its nearly 700 main contributions
and nearly 2,000 smaller ones? Let me
answer this way: within an hour of pageflipping, I cleared away 9 inches of prime
real estate along my studys bookshelves
to put its four hefty volumes within easy
reach. Some of the sections are books in
their own right such as nearly 450
pages devoted to Solar . . . topics, ranging from chemical abundances to Sun2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope August 2001

75

books & beyond

The entire contents of the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics is available by subscription on the Internet at www.ency-astro
.com, complete with search capability and
cross-references. The online version will be
continually updated by the publishers.

76

terpreted as debris from the comet, but

recent wisdom suggests an ejection of
stuff from the Sun itself. Third, coronal
radiation from well-ionized iron also
seemed to increase, perhaps from enhanced density due to the comets passage; but again, the Sun seems responsible, for no such intensity spike has been
seen from lots of Sungrazers since.
Normally we imagine comets brightening dramatically as they approach the
Sun, as volatile materials are driven off
ever more fiercely. Not so with Sungrazers. A diagram shows that these comets,
as they close within about 8 million km
from the Suns center, start to fade, probably because all their volatiles have been
used up. Then . . . poof!
In short, I learned a bunch from just
four pages.
The 2,000 or so black-and-white illustrations wont knock your socks off, but
they are largely very relevant additions to
the text. Each volume also has a color insert, though some subjects seem gratuitous. (In the body of the text, the captions for these images are juxtaposed to
black-and-white copies. But you dont
know that a caption refers to a color
image until you get to the last line
this is a not-too-bright scheme.)
Now a few bagatelles. Reviewers do
this kind of nitpicking to strut their stuff
and prove that they actually looked at
the books.
Do I detect a European bias? Theres
a British Astronomical Association
header but none, not even an index

August 2001 Sky & Telescope

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The few color images are relegated to at least

one insert in each volume. Black-and-white
versions appear in the main text.

S&T: CRAIG MICHAEL UTTER

ity, I let Volume 1 fall open at random.

I got really lucky, hitting Comets:
Kreutz Sungrazing, a subject that has
fascinated me ever since witnessing the
daylight comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965. Douglas A. Biesecker nicely covers the fabulous impact spacecraft have had on the
rate of discovery of these special visitors.
From the mid-1800s to 1979 astronomers
discovered one Sungrazer every 10 to 15
years, on average. Now the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft finds one or two every month!
These are mainly the tiniest fragments,
some tens of meters across, of the 100kilometer monster comet that shattered
to form the Kreutz group in the first
place.
The new information I gleaned from
Bieseckers article included the fascinating
history of a Sungrazer called SOLWIND-1
(a.k.a. Comet Howard-Koomen-Michels),
discovered in 1979 and named after an instrument aboard the P78-1 military satellite. It remains the brightest comet observed so close to the Sun. But dont try
to find SOLWIND-1 in Sky & Telescope
back then. Our first mention of the eventually declassified comet was in the May
1989 issue (page 566).
Biesecker does a good job putting into
perspective three checkered discoveries
sparked by this comet. First, astronomers
initially thought it to be a Sun-striker,
but later number-crunching proved that
it missed the Sun though by less than
two Earth diameters. Second, a brightening seen in the Suns corona had been in-

entry, for the Astronomical League.

(Your intrepid reviewer did, however,
find the AL in a table.) And isnt it odd
to include a biography of Mars-mapper
Eugenios Antoniadi but not one of
comet-hunter/variable-star observer Leslie
Peltier?
Despite page 607, physicist Robert
Dicke hasnt filed an income-tax return
since 1997.
I wasnt surprised to see a mention
of the Dobsonian telescope design. But
its too bad that John Dobson himself
wasnt mentioned. Heck, James Nasmyth
made the cut!
I found the Media section much
too limited. It fails to convey a sense of
the vast diversity of first-class astronomical organizations, magazines, and other
resources available worldwide in many
languages.
Under M, I was surprised and a bit
embarrassed to find that 20 percent of
the biographical entries were unknown
or only vaguely familiar to me. The encyclopedia contains a lot of obscure (mainly ancient and Renaissance) folks buried
in its pages maybe too many, at the
expense of more contemporary worthies.
Deep-sky prowlers should enjoy the descriptions of all the members of

Messiers menagerie, because each one is

characterized and brought to life
through its physical attributes. Such
hard information is often lacking in
literature aimed at skygazers.
One index item (among many I
could mention) that you wont find is
metagalaxy, a term defined in the
American Heritage Dictionary as describing the entire physical universe. (In the
war over the size of the Milky Way it was
used by the losing side.) Its still a great
word and should be rehabilitated.
Finally, I cant help but be amused at
a remark I read in Nature while preparing
this review: It would be easy to dismiss
astrobiology . . . (does anyone remember
exobiology?). This encyclopedia, in fact,
uses the header Exobiology (astrobiology appears only in the index). The International Astronomical Union, supposedly the world authority on such things,
calls its topical commission Bioastronomy. Will a little green man please step
up and fix this mess!
At $650, the Encyclopedia of Astronomy
and Astrophysics seems awesomely expensive, but its not. Per page, it costs
only three times more than that crummy
paperback novel you left on a plane last
week. Furthermore, this encyclopedia
unlike any other similar work in astronomy has the potential to never go out
of date. You can get an annual subscription to Internet updates for $200 (see
www.ency-astro.com). Murdin promises
quarterly updates and estimates that
one-fifth of the material will be revised
every year.
This unique and bold plan seems
wonderful. But I see a price to be paid.
Its the truncation of history. As facts are
gleaned at an ever more furious rate,
writers will have to lop off bits of the
past to make way for the new. (Throughout the last four decades, Ive found that
the latest crop of wunderkinder knows
less about what went before than the
previous crop.) In print, its a matter of
containing cost; electronically, its a matter of containing volume. An encyclopedia is supposed to feature tight synthesis,
not a magnum opus for every topic.
Can you fall in love with an encyclopedia? I have several times. And Im in
love again.

Advertisement

When Leif Robinson, retired S&T editor in

chief, wants information, he always runs first
to the printed page as many as he can find
in his libraries.
2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope August 2001

77