Customer Reviews

Great Observatories of the World

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This book is an indulgence for those of us fascinated by big telescopes. It includes short discussions of each of the world's most important observatories, with brief technical interludes on topics like spectroscopy and adaptive optics. But this is not a book to read, it is a book to browse through, look at the pictures, and sample the text. The text certainly has its errors, such as substituting "millions" for "billions" in comparing the cost of space telescopes, and placing the date of the 3m Shane telescope as 1979 (it was competed in 1959 and renamed after Shane in 1977.) But we can overlook errors like this in a book designed for voyeurs. If big telescopes turn you on and you have a few extra dollars available, you'll probably like this book!

This book is fun to read, and a lot can be learned from it, but beware of the numeric errors: do not trust dates, sizes, distances. Common errors include: billion sometimes means 10^9 and sometimes 10^12, distances to galaxies are completely wrong (e.g. 10 light years to M82), use of thousand instead of thousandths, and multiple others.

Obviously no book that is only 240 pages long, and mostly photographs at that, can include all of the important observatories of the world. It is inevitable that some favorites will be omitted. But it is disappointing that more care was not taken with the photographs -- after all, this really is mostly a coffee-table picture book. Many of the photos are soft, and moreover suffer from shallow depth-of-field... critical parts of the photo are not even in focus.

This book had the potential to be great. And its a great book for the observatories that are covered. But the omission of some of the really GREAT observatories was a bit of a disappointment to me. There is about 3/4 of a page on Palomar. And even that is somewhat inaccurate.

If you're looking for Palomar info, get "Perfect Machine" by Florence. A great read...

OK, it's a good-looking book with lots of great shots of interesting research observatories around the world. My great disappointment is the near-complete absence any mention of the Palomar Telescope, except for a brief mention in the introduction. Or Kitt Peak for that matter. Or any number of architecturally important observatories. I can't explain how they chose the contents of their book, or why they devoted an entire section of the book to telescopes that haven't even been built yet.