Middleton, James. A Celestial Atlas: Containing Maps of All the Constellations, Visible in Great Britain, with Corresponding Blank Maps of the Stars: Systematically Arranged for Communicating a Practical Knowledge of the Heavens. London, [1842].
There must have been a welcome market for popular star atlases in England and the United States in the period after 1820, if the atlases by Brooke (1820), Jamieson (1822), Green (1824), Rubie (1830), and Burritt (1835) are any indication (exhibit, items 9-11, and Out of This World, items 39-40). Middleton’s innovation, in his stated opinion, was the juxtaposition of illustrated maps with white-on-black maps of just the stars. Actually, Goldbach had done with very thing in his Neuester Himmels-Atlas of 1799 (Out of This World, item 34), but, admittedly, this was not written for an English audience.
Middleton’s atlas is laid out on five charts, one depicting the polar constellations, and four more showing the stars of winter, spring, summer, and fall. There is no map of the southern stars. Each map has some of the constellation figures hand-colored in light pastels, which makes them fairly attractive. Middleton took his figures and star placements either directly from Bode’s Vorstellung of 1805, or from an intermediary, such as Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (exhibit item 10). Jamieson seems a more likely source, since Jamieson had refashioned Canis major into a whippet-like canine, and Middleton uses a nearly identical figure.