BARNARD, Edward Emerson (1857-1923). A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way. Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1927.

First edition of the first significant photographic star atlas, illustrated with 51 original photographs and accompanying charts mapping the stellar regions. Barnard states in his introduction that he personally examined all 35,700 photographs that were used in this atlas's production. 700 copies were published. Barnard was "the foremost observational astronomer of his time ... Of great importance was the beginning Barnard made in photographing the Milky Way. It can fairly be said that, although photography had been used in astronomy to a limited and somewhat experimental extent, it was not until Barnard’s wholesale use of it that the technique became a vital and spectacular part of regular astronomical observing" (DSB). Barnard initially worked at Lick Observatory at Mt Hamilton. In 1895, he went to the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Yerkes Observatory. Using the Bruce photographic telescope, he continued his survey of the Milky Way and of the dark nebulae he discovered. Although funding for this publication was granted by the Carnegie Institution in 1907, Barnard’s great work was not published until four years after his death. It was edited by Edwin B. Frost, Director of the Yerkes Observatory, and Barnard’s assistant Mary Calvert. She helped prepare the charts and completed Barnard’s "Catalogue of 349 Dark Objects in the Sky," which is printed on pages 18–29.
"[Barnard] was using wide-field portrait lenses to take a superb series of photographs of areas in the Milky Way. They showed a complicated structure of star clouds, and rifts and holes where there were few or no stars. At first Barnard believed this was the real distribution of stars, but as he continued his work he almost reluctantly accepted that these were true clouds, not of bright gas but of dark obscuring material, and in his two-volume Atlas of photographs, published in 1927, he included a catalogue of the more prominent of them’ (David Dewhirst and Michael Hoskin, "The Message of Starlight: The Rise of Astrophysics," in The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy).

Two volumes, oblong quarto (Atlas: 247 x 269mm, Charts: 269 x 269mm). Atlas volume with portrait frontispiece (offset to title), half-tone plate illustrating the Bruce photographic telescope at the Yerkes Observatory; and 51 full-page gelatin silver prints (occasional silvering), mounted on linen as issued. Chart volume comprising 50 lithographed charts each with accompanying table. Original cloth (a little soiled and rubbed). Provenance: Floyd Houston of New Suffolk (ownership inscriptions dated 1955).