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David Pike, you wrote:
"The NCP is up, the SCP is down, and east is to the right.  Somebody, and I’m not looking at anyone in particular here, but he keeps chickens and advises film production companies, has got into the back door of a celestial programme such as Stellarium and increased SHA Sirius and Procyon a degree or two."

Heh. It's quite possible that the creator of that star chart pair had chickens, but it's not at all likely that he advised film production companies since... there weren't any! Well, almost none. These charts were published about 1905. "Le Voyage dans la Lune" came out a few years earlier, but that's about it. :)

The star chart I posted was an actual stereoscope slide intended to show the sky with a hint of three-dimensionality. You can try to see it without a stereoscope by free fusing. Some of you may remember doing that from the days when those Magic Eye images were popular. I'm adding a 25% size version of the image below. Try looking at it from a moderate distance... You see Orion twice. But if you let your eyes relax, you can get the copies of Orion to overlay and merge. When you do that, you should discover that Sirius and Procyon "pop" as if they are floating above the background.

To a lesser extent, Aldebaran floats in the image, too. These were early days in catalogues of stellar distances, so there were some errors and of course some stars that were not widely known as nearby stars. There's a star to the "right of Bellatrix — π³ Orionis — which should appear in the foreground, too, but that may not have been known in 1905.

Frank Reed

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