We’ve also corrected a few old star names to agree in spelling with the International Astronomical Union’s 2018 list of officially approved names. In Paris last fall, the author spotted the French version of the Pocket Sky Atlas in the Maison de l’Astronomie, a store devoted to telescopes, binoculars, and globes of all sorts. All of them are easily picked up with a small telescope. About half of these were already in the atlas but not specially marked, and the rest (those just fainter than the atlas’s cutoff of magnitude 7.6) now have their locations marked on the charts as well. We now have a list of 24 very nearby stars, all within just 5 parsecs (16.3 light-years) of our solar system, together with their names, distances in light-years, and the charts where they can be found. Others have wanted better information on nearby stars, which often come up in stories about newly discovered exoplanets. A new table in the back answers this plea, tallying all 53 of these stars with their variable-star designations and the charts on which they are plotted. But users have asked us to list them separately so they could be hunted down in a more systematic fashion.

For example, we already had more than four dozen carbon stars marked on the charts, notable for their striking reddish hue in amateur telescopes.

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