Counting the Stars

English stargazers are moaning. Well they may. They met last week -- the Royal Astronomical Society -- on the day when a 40-years task they undertook in 1885 with the stargazers of the world, was to have been complete. The The Britons had completed their share of the work, but no other shares were done, some not even begun.

The job was the remapping of the heavens, the relocating and recounting of over 100 million stars. The Greenwich and Oxford observatories have prepared and distributed costly maps and photographs showing how they figured the 100 million are located, and the plan was to check results with the findings of other observatories. But with new finds being made constantly, adding thousands of stars to the scene, and with other maps delayed, the British work will soon be out of date, gone for naught.