Science fiction writers have long had a problem with astronomy books. They go into great detail showing where the stars are in Earth's sky. We SF writers aren't interested in the constellations. We need a three-dimensional view of space where the stars are displayed in their true positions with respect to their neighbors. If you are writing a book where the captain orders the astrogator to route the ship from Rigel to Antares, you don't want to stop en route at a star on the other side of the universe. The Astrogator's Handbook
was created to resolve this conundrum. It maps 3000 of the closest stars in a format akin to a 3-D chess board as viewed from the vicinity of Polaris. The book reconstructs the three dimensional structure of local space, with each star in its proper position.
