Reach for Reference

by Barbara Ripp Safford

One of my earliest memories is of my father showing me how to find the North Star. This was a common experience for a rural child, and it was not until I was in college and inviting “big city kids” to the farm for a weekend that I realized that some of them had not had the opportunity to see beyond city lights when growing up. Later, a language arts teacher confessed that she and her students found the mythology references to constellations completely mystifying—none of them had grown up in an environment where they were able to identify much in the nighttime skies. Many years after that first North Star experience, my father and I watched with awe the broadcast of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. It seems ironic that as we become more of an urban culture, the more we learn about space and the less we see of it outside news reports.

National science standards for space and astronomy for primary and intermediate students are quite sophisticated (motion of star patterns, Earth's relationship to the sun and other planets, vastness of space and the objects in it), but suggested activities default to darkening the classroom and playing with flashlights. Now, when even more children are growing up without the experience of seeing outside the city lights, we must default to such artificial activities, and to websites, television and video, planetariums, and books to provide understanding of the celestial worlds beyond their own.

Recent astronomy reference books are beautiful, make use of space exploration from telescopes to deep space probes, and employ computer graphics to show us what we cannot see from our backyards, even in rural settings. An elementary reference collection should have several items to answer questions and to allow children to browse and wonder. Luckily there are some very good options. Some older titles already in your collection would include The DK Space Encyclopedia (1999), one of the standard field guides to the stars, and perhaps The Peterson First Guide to Astronomy (1998) and The Peterson First Guide to the Solar System (1999). In addition to these, there are three recent atlas titles that should be considered. Although all three are called atlases, and they do have at least a few star maps, they perhaps are named more realistically in another sense of the word “atlas” which implies pages of large illustrations. All three are copiously and beautifully illustrated.

The Reader's Digest Children's Atlas of the Universe is a “companion” to the same publisher's Children's Atlas of the World . It is the largest in size and the most comprehensive of the three. Divided into three main sections— Our Solar System, Deep Space, and Stargazing— it also has useful introductory and supplemental information. Sections are indicated by a graphic in the upper left corner of each page, rather than by chapter titles or book design. The preliminary pages include a table of contents, a guide to using the atlas, an overview of planetary exploration, an explanation of our galaxy, and then several pages of the details of space science from ancient man to the space probes that are still approaching their targets. Double-page spreads are used for information about each topic in the introduction and the three main sections. Impressive photographs and graphics have explanitory legends and are complemented with a summary text in a large font. The vocabulary of astronomy is not adapted easily to primary children, but the vocabulary and length of the descriptions will not overwhelm intermediate children. The information is given in context, with comparisons to help students relate new information to what they already know. There is a fact chart on each page, and either an Amazing Fact box or an activity box, and sometimes both. An occasional Look Again box asks questions that can be answered by the information on the page. The Solar System section has a location illustration in the bottom right of each facing-page spread.

The Stargazing section has seasonal maps of north and south skies with the major constellations identified and portrayed in pictures to demonstrate why they were so named. Descriptions and directions are simple and clear. The supplementary sections at the end of the book include an extensive series of tables called a Universe Fact File, a timeline, a glossary, and an index.

DK's Children's Night Sky Atlas has a slightly narrower focus, with the main part of the book being a chronology of what can be seen in the sky month by month in both the northern and southern hemispheres. A two-page article about a constellation and an article on some other aspect of astronomy supplement the monthly sky maps. So for January, for example, there are two facing pages of sky maps, an article about the con-stellation Orion with the facing page a sky map with a transparent overlay showing how the stars form the figure, and a two-page photographic essay about the lives of stars. Each month repeats this pattern (although only half of the constellations have the over-lays) with essays covering such topics as star types, the Milky Way, galaxies, the sun and moon, the planets, and the universe.

Preliminary pages feature a contextual introduction with progressive pictures from people to hometown to Earth to Solar System to Milky Way to the local galaxy to the Uni-verse. Other picture essays explain the night sky, and show the north and south polar skies and four sectional equatorial sky maps.

There is a glossary and an index. The design of the book will appeal to young readers, and the combination of pictures and text contain much fascinating information.

The newest of the three atlases is the Scholastic Atlas of Space, part of a series that also includes Atlas of Weather and Atlas of Oceans . This slim but attractive volume is another “outsourced” reference book, produced and copyrighted by QA International, a company known for its computer graphics. (QA markets the book directly under the title Atlas of the Universe .) One has to wonder if the kind of glaring error on the first page of text (the Big Bang is thought to have been 15 billion years ago, not 15 million as stated on page six) is allowed to pass because the producer and the publisher each expected the other to do the proofing. The ordering of the chapters is also different in this book as it goes in logi-cal progression from the Universe to the galaxies and the Milky Way, then to stars and sun and our Solar System with planets, the moon (separated from the Earth by all of the outer planets), asteroids, comets, and meteors. The final section is about observing and ex-ploring the Universe and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. While the order here is logical, it is opposite from the more constructivist child-to-Universe arrangement of Children's Atlas of the Universe , and from the contextual introduction of Children's Night Sky Atlas . The Atlas of Space also has some useful fact charts as supplementary material and simplified star charts, activities, a glossary, and an index.

Just as with the other two atlases, information is presented in two-page spreads with colorful computer graphics, inset photo-graphs, a brief but clear large-font text paragraph, and inset fact boxes and charts. The ef-ect is much like the entire Atlas of the Universe and the picture essays in the Night Sky Atlas . This is the only one of the three books that discusses the controversy about Pluto's status as a planet, and the text has been writ-ten carefully so that it won't appear dated as new discoveries are made.

Because new information about astronomy is coming to us constantly as advanced telescopes and space probes open our under-standing of our Solar System and the Universe, it is important to remind students to always check the NASA children's site on the Web and the most recent articles in the subscription databases. These three atlases along with other standard reference sources can form a good basis for understanding new discoveries that will be made throughout this new generation's lifetime.