Reprint of Millennium Star Atlas
21 September 2005
The Millennium Star Atlas is to be reprinted in a soft cover version. The Atlas contains 1548 sky charts, depicting the heavens with unprecedented information on the nature of our Galaxy using the stellar information drawn from ESA's Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues.The Atlas was originally released in 1997 and represents the astrometric results from the Hipparcos mission. At the time of publication it represented a ten- to one hundred-fold increase in accuracy compared to all previous sky surveys and it still is the most accurate star catalogue available.
Started in 1980 the Hipparcos programme had a single goal: to produce the most accurate positional survey of more than 100 000 stars, pinpointing their locations, and in the process determining their distances, their motions, and other characteristics such as their variability and binary nature. The Hipparcos mission was a major technical challenge for both European industry which built the satellite and the European astronomical community which produced the resulting star catalogues.