[PIRATED TRANSLATIONS / THE STAR CATALOGUE / NAVIGATION / CONSTELLATIONS] Hangi yildizdir: Bilinmeyen yildizlarin taninmasina aid cedvelleri hâvîdir.

HARVEY, HERBERT W[ILLIAM], Matbaa-i Bahriye, Bahriye Nezâreti Birinci Daire Besinci Sube Nesriyâti, Istanbul, AH 1328, March = [1912].

Contemporary black cloth. Oblong cr. 8vo. (14 x 20 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). 45 p. Wear to boards, re-backed spine, light fading on pages. Overall, a very good copy.

Extremely rare first and only Ottoman Turkish edition of this early constellation catalogue for navigators including coordinates of "unknown" stars in the sky, apparently, it's a pirated translation from "What star is it? Tables for identifying unknown stars" by Herbert William Harvey, who was the commander of the British Naval School. The book was anonymously translated to Ottoman Turkish in the early 19th century apparently for use in the Ottoman Naval Schools and published one year earlier from World War 1.

This rare star catalogue starts with an introduction (pp. 2-4). The calculations are taught through two examples of coordinates of the 29 January 1912 night sky pp. 5-8, and the tables of the star catalogue with the Arabic numeral system of coordinates pp. 9-35. The interesting last chapter includes Latin names, signs, angles, and distances of the constellations pp. 36-45.

For a late edition of original work, Harvey writes in the introduction to the book: “Its usefulness in practical higher navigation having been thus satisfactorily proved, it remains only to recommend the little work to younger members of our profession who are still but students of the Stellar branch of Nautical Astronomy, by whom it will be found a sure and simple guide to a lasting and intimate knowledge of how to make use of the stars without necessarily committing their names and relative positions to memory.”.

Özege 6794., TBTK 12478., As of December 2023, only one register is in the OCLC (850835121), not navigated to any library.