Customer Reviews

An Atlas of Local Group Galaxies (Astrophysics and Space Science Library)

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An Atlas is a difficult type of book to review--unless there are flaws! I am not a professional astronomer, but a serious amateur who has a professional scientific background. I bought this book for my own interest, and I am somewhat mystified by the number of errors I have uncovered in just a day or two of examination.

It appears that at one point in the publication of this atlas, that some of the electronic materials were inadvertantly lost due to a computer failure. This necessitated an effort to reconstruct some of the lost data, but it appears that there were still some unresolved problems. This is truly unfortunate, especially for an expensive reference such as this, to be plagued with flaws that became obvious even to a non-professional reviewer.

As an example, there is a single plate of the Fornax Spheroidal Dwarf Galaxy, with the globular clusters identified. Upon careful study, only one globular cluster (NGC 1049=GC3) is correctly identified; 2 oter objects identified as clusters are actually stars, and one is a galaxy.

There are numerous errors in the tables, where references to plate numbers are incorrect.

I have some serious reservations regards recommending this book to others. The print job is excellent, and the plates (really the heart of the book) are well reproduced; this, however , does not compensate for the errors contained therin.

A very serious error was made in an earlier review of this book by amateur astronomer Roger Raurbach. He stated that four of the five globular clusters of the Fornax dwarf galaxy were misidentified in the Atlas. That is incorrect. The three inner clusters were discovered by Harlow Shapley, Walter Baade and Edwin Hubble and I discovered the two outer clusters; their identities, as shown in the Atlas, were published in the Astronomical Journal, volume 66, page 8, 1961. Their positions are well-known to professional astronomers and several papers, including some based on Hubble Space Telescope images, have been published recently, covering both color-magnitude diagrams of the clusters' stars and spectroscopy, giving their metallicities. Please discount my rating of this book, which is meaningless, as I am an author.