Perhaps the most common question that a child asks when he or she sees the night sky from a dark site for the first time is: 'How many stars are there?
This excellent book by Dr Gregory Matloff could be viewed as a large multi- disciplinary compendium of past research, current investigations and future research in astronautics.
In the early part of the eighteenth century, Francesco Bianchini of Verona turned his primitive telescope - a refractor of only a few centimetres aperture but with an enormous focal length of around 20 metres - on the planet Venus.
The history of astronomy is, like most history, a multidimensional story, and when writing about a specific period, the author has to decide how to handle all the developments of earlier times in order to set the scene.
In Small Astronomical Observatories, Patrick Moore has collected descriptions of amateur and small professional observatories currently in use in Europe and America, showing how many astronomers have built their own observatory, often with effective and sometimes extraordinary improvisations to reduce the cost.
Eyes on the Universe is an illustrated history of the telescope, beginning with pre-telescopic observatories and the refractors of Galileo, Lippershey and Digges, and ending with the most modern instruments including - of course - the Hubble Space Telescope.
Seeing Stars is written for astronomers, regardless of the depth of their theoretical knowledge, who are taking their first steps in observational astronomy.
"e;l hope that people all around the world never forget what a wonderful thing it is to lie on your back and look up at the stars"e; Pete Seeger What is the fascination that constellations hold for people?
Patrick Moore has pulled together a group of professional and amateur astronomers, each an expert in a particular field, to describe how to observe every category of object that is within reach of an astronomical telescope of modest size.
Although transits of planets across the Sun are rare (only Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun closer than us, and so can transit the Sun's disc) amateur astronomers can observe, record and image other kinds of transit, which are very much more frequent.
The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the numerous safe methods of observing the Sun and solar eclipses, and to suggest objects and features to observe and observing programmes to follow.
Because today's amateur astronomical telescopes are both powerful and affordable, spectroscopy - once the province of professionals - is becoming more and more popular.
As an amateur astronomer with years of experience, I marvel at the joy experienced by a beginner who successfully hunts down their first deep-space object in a telescope.
The modern aspiring astronomer is faced with a bewil- dering choice of commercially produced telescopes, including all the designs considered in the preceding chapter.
In 1996 Meade, the world's largest astronomical telescope manufacturer, introduced the ETX, a low-cost and genuinely portable instrument capable of results close to the theoretical limits of optical performance.
Almost every serious amateur astronomer knows the benefit of having a fixed observatory of some sort - it saves a vast amount of time and effort during every observing session - and this book provides the necessary help.
Amateur astronomy is becoming more and more popular, mostly because of the availability of relatively low-cost astronomical telescopes of superb quality - commercially-made Schmidt-Cassegrain and Maksutovs.
One of the wonderful aspects of the US Manned Spaceflight Program was the opportunity for people around the entire globe to participate in one of man's greatest adventures.
