Customer Reviews

Horizons With Infotrac: Exploring the Universe

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is the Eighth Edition of a truly superb textbook for an introductory astronomy course, or for anyone (amateur astronomers?)who is looking for a great and beautifully illustrated general reference source on astronomy. I've been teaching intro astronomy for many years and keep my eye on all the textbooks. Aimed primarily at non-science majors, Seeds' book is a hum-dinger and really the best I see out there at this time.

The author has a very clear and quite intertaining writing style, and each edition of the book is even more beautifully illustrated than the last. The artwork especially in the last two editions is simply super, and clearly illustrate many phenomena that students often have trouble with. This textbook covers every topic needed in a survey course from the nature of light, a bit of astronomy history and telescopes, properties and formation of stars and galaxies, the planets, and very current data on cosmology, dark matter, life in the universe and so on. Very up to date!

Mike Seeds' book goes fairly easy on the math (although all important concepts are covered)compared to some other "intro astronomy" books. Overall, I find this book ideally suited to a survey course for non-science majors. For science majors or a textbook that might also be useful in somewhat higher level astronomy courses, I would recommend Kaufmann/Freeman's "Universe" as an excellent choice.

Seeds' book is comprehensive and about 500 pages in length - similar to almost all intro astronomy textbooks. To a great extent, literally all these 500 page textbooks are way too lengthy for a one semester survey course. It is difficult to get students to read this much for each class. I keep hoping that Mike Seeds, and excellent author, will produce a 250-300 page (maximum) version of Horizons specifically for one semester courses. Until someone creates a shorter version of the same high quality, I'll keep recommending this textbook.

I thought this was a wonderful book. It has a lot of wonderful pictures and excelent diagrams. This book goes into many different areas of astronomy giving the reader a well rounded bounty of knowledge about our Universe. It is also rather easy to understant. You don't need to be an astro-physicist to understant this book, but after reading it you might want to become one!

All beginning astronomy books have to cover about the same material. You know what they are: the Big Band, the Time-Line of the Universe, the Sun, the Solar System, the stars -- and that's just what this book covers.

So why would I recommend this book over others?

1. It's updated frequently. This gives Dr. Seeds frequent opportunities to update it with the latest theories (i.e. Pluto, Planet No More), and even more important the latest pictures, which seem to be coming at us with ever increasing speed.

2. It's about the right length. At 516 pages it seems like a bit much for an introductory course. But that's before you consider how profusely illustrated the book. Were it reduced to just text, like the first course I took oh so many years ago, it would probably be about a hundred and fifty pages.

3. It has a student centered approach. It's not just a dry lecture on what's happening to the Cosmos, it's a 'where are we,' 'how do we know that,' 'where are we going' approach that (hopefully) the student can see to relate herself to a bigger world.

4. Beyond just astronomy, this book teaches the whole scientific approach: peer review of articles, use of theories to predict discoveries, etc. This is a subject sadly lacking in today's education.

This book could be used as a course taught at either a first year background course for science/physics/astronomy majors, or would be good for a non-science major science course.

As a freshman in college (majoring in Astronomy) I had to use Horizons 4e for an Intro Astronomy course, and fell in love with it. I loved it so much that I bought Horizons 6e! I think this great book just keeps getting better! The art and photos are fantastic, and tie in well with the text, which is an easy read, great for majors and non-majors alike. In summary, Horizons 6e is a great text, well worth the money.

I reviewed a copy of the instructor's edition of as a candidate text for an Astronomy 101 class.

It is very pretty, and there is some good content, but it is not particularly well organized for a student.

The illustrations are numerous, large, and colorful. They are also crowded with insets, labels, and text in boxes.

The typography and page layout are noisy, inelegant, and distracting. I counted as many as 4 different typefaces (in three different colors) in the body text of a single spread.

The text is dense on the page, but the descriptions and explanations are interrupted by pointers to "Ace Astronomy" content, sidebars entitled "Window on Science", "Reasoning With Numbers", etc.

The index is sparse and oddly unhelpful.

The overall impression is that the author and editors are trying to cover too much material it too thin a book.

There are too many kinds of enhancements, and too many instances of enhanced content, inserted at the expense of a clear and orderly presentation.

The frequent revisions to include the most up-to-date images and information -- announced on the cover of each new edition like cover lines on a popular magazine-- make the book seem somewhat disposable. As discouraging a prospect for the student who wants to keep the text, as for the student who plans to sell it back to the bookstore.

I will not be using this text for my class.

This is my first time getting a kindle textbook and I don't foresee myself buying huge, heavy textbooks ever again unless the published does not offer then as an e-book. I access the textbook on my I-Pad through the kindle app and it is absolutely the best! The pictures are crisp, clear and in COLOR. Key terms are highlighted and when I click on them, it leads me directly to the definition in the glossary. The one downside is that even though its a kindle book, it runs about $105 which is pricey but for anybody that is on the fence about purchasing this for Kindle, it's still cheaper than regular price and it comes in the convenience of a Kindle or I-Pad. No more lugging around giant textbooks!

I had this book for my Astronomy 101 class. I'm a science geek, and this book made things even simpler. Very easy to understand, aswesome pictures, good information!

Horizons: Sixth Edition is an all-color book talking about the cosmos, also known as the universe. I am currently using this book at UC Berkeley for the summer sessions course, Astronomy 10. It includes two CD-ROMs which are really helpful in your research. I recommend this book because my professor chose it and it is quite worth the seventy dollars.

I received this book for a correspondence course I am taking about astronomy. Although the book is filled with interesting astronomical and historical facts, and absolutely stunning images, there are a number of serious flaws that detract from the quality of this book.

The pages are thoroughly littered with little boxes containing sections entitled, "Reasoning with Numbers", "Building Scientific Arguments", and "Windows on Science", which I find very distracting. If that is not enough, text will often break mid-sentence into sections called, "Guided Discovery Figures", which consist of several pages of heavily captioned figures - this completely interrupts the flow of the text.

Having studied and taught mathematics extensively, I am of the opinion that if mathematics is introduced at all, it should be taken seriously. The "Reasoning with Numbers" sections and associated problems only feign seriousness. Formulas are introduced with no derivations, little motivation, and often gross simplifications. The student is then asked solve problems which mainly consist of plugging the numbers into a forumula; little can be gained through such mechanical manipulations. Many of the explanations about how astronomers compute quantities related to celestial bodies also contain gross simplifications. While it is clear to me that these computations lead to lower/upper bounds or mere approximations of the true quantities, less experienced readers might not be able to make such distinctions and become confused as a result. Either do it right, or leave it out.

Horizons 12e has no place in the classroom. The information is so horribly organized it's almost like explaining the Universe from the Cosmic Horizon inwards. To give you an example of how poor Horizons is at TEACHING astronomy, the actual word "Astronomy" is never defined and isn't even listed in the index.

To be more specific, one would think a good textbook would begin with simple concepts like gravity and physics to help introduce the reader to what they're observing but instead Ch 2 jumps right into celestial motions and the solar ecliptic. Ch 3 covers solar and lunar cycles which will blow your mind if you're still thinking the Moon is made of cheese, then FINALLY in Ch 4 Horizons introduces this thing called "astronomy" and the gradual evolution of the concepts behind it. ...!?!

There are 11 different types of "Special Features" that clutter the Chapters with interesting but often irrelevant and distracting commentary.

The massive 2-page posters cover way too much information that I often just have to tell my class "Read this for a couple minutes then we'll talk about it".

"The Origin of the Solar System" is Ch 15, which, you think would come a little sooner.

Chapter 2 discusses in great detail Star Brightness & Distance, as well as Visual Magnitude...which...isn't discussed again till Ch 8.

Overall Horizons reads like all the plaques at a natural history museum put into a book. It's chapters are picture-heavy factoids that don't transition into any other chapters and will leave you asking more questions than before you started.