McCain Library & Archives University of Southern Mississippi |
Rey
didn’t know much about celestial cartography or mechanics when he first decided
to write books about the night sky. His research took four years, and in 1951,
thirty-five years after his first frustrating attempts to find the
constellations using his “small astronomy book” on the battlefields of Europe,
Rey began to redraw the constellations “my own way.” He experimented, connecting the stars the way children connect
the dots to make a drawing. “I made the constellations clearer. I took exactly
the same stars and connected them differently,” he once said.To
learn more about Rey’s passion for astronomy, see “Hans Rey: The Man Who
Illustrated the Heavens,” published in the October issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.