Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 15:20

On a crystal-clear evening, on vacation perhaps, how often do we contemplate the night sky and promise to learn the stars and constellations? Somehow we never get round to it. Charts in newspapers look too complicated. Astronomical handbooks are equally daunting.

'Stargazing: A Graphic Guide To The Universe' is the answer – the night sky simply and beautifully mapped, an animated stellar atlas that works from anywhere on Earth. Season-by-season, it signposts and explains. Little by little – like learning a language – the cosmos is comprehensible.

Animated vignettes turn points of light – stars, nebulae, galaxies – into supernovae, flashing pulsars, searing quasars and rotating swarms of 150-billion stars with super-massive black holes at their centers.

The sky is viewed from three latitude bands – from the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere (Japan, Europe, North America), from the tropics, and from the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere (Australasia and southern South America).