Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope [Paperback]

Fred Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2006

The history of the telescope is a rich story of human ingenuity and perseverance involving some of the most colorful figures of the scientific world- Galileo, Johann Kepler, Isaac Newton, William Herschel, George Ellery Hale, and Edwin Hubble.Stargazer brings to life these brilliant, if sometimes quirky, scientists as they turned their eyes and ideas to the stars. Written by one of Australia's top astronomers, Stargazer reveals lucidly, and without technical jargon (but with a dash of humor), the history, science, and technology behind the telescope, and the enormous impact that it has had for four hundred years on how we have come to understand our universe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's perhaps surprising that an instrument as seemingly simple as the telescope has had a large impact on human history, from changes in warfare to helping us understand our place in the cosmos. Watson, the astronomer in charge of Australia's largest optical telescope and a science writer, provides a fine overview of the 400-year history of this invention. He's strongest when discussing the people most responsible for moving the field of astronomy forward, controversies surrounding their inventions and the complexities of their lives. From Tycho Brahe, the brilliant early Danish astronomer, to locomotive builder Andrew Barclay, whose telescopes were so flawed that he was convinced Saturn looked "like a half-eaten apple," Watson relates intriguing stories while providing them with a rich cultural context. While still interesting, the work is less compelling when Watson provides specifics about the physics and optics of telescopes. And with so much ground to cover, he rarely delves deeply and provides little if any new information. Yet gathering all of this material in one place and presenting it in such an engaging style is a considerable accomplishment. B&w illus. (Aug. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This saga of astronomers afflicted with "aperture fever," Watson's diagnosis of the drive to construct ever-larger telescopes, is an avuncular amble through four centuries of the instrument's development. Watson illuminates famous astronomers--Newton, Cassegrain, Schmidt--along with the more obscure. The telescope's exact origin may never be known, but history tips its hat to Dutch optician Hans Lipperhey, unsuccessful applicant for a Dutch patent, and to Galileo, epochal maker of the first telescopic discoveries. The race for bigger and better telescopes was on; however, it was impeded by two fundamental technical problems: spherical and chromatic aberration. Discerning the correct shapes for lenses and mirrors was more easily done than eliminating spurious colors, and by the time William Herschel made his entrance on the astronomical stage in the 1780s, aperture fever assumed the size-matters symptoms it still exhibits today. Watson's narrative of inevitable overreaching and brilliant success is often funny, occasionally poignant, and definitely accessible--a fine reflection of this Australian astronomer's popularizing skills. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (June 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306814838
• ISBN-13: 978-0306814839
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,138,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Astronomy & Space Science > Telescopes
  • #91 in Books > Science & Math > Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Scientific Instruments

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading for the telescope lover, but ..., January 14, 2006

By 

Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope (Hardcover)

This is a book I really wanted to like, and I don't regret reading it. That said, this is more a book for people interested in learning a few more details about the pre-1900 history of the telescope than a book to get someone excited about the development of the telescope.

Overall the prose is serviceable, if a bit pedestrian. But it is uneven, with some excellent passages and some that are a bit of a slog. Up through the late nineteenth century the author presents all the major threads of the story, but toward the end the book becomes more a series of highlights rather than a survey of developments. My sense in reading it was that the author ran out of steam and couldn't handle the twentieth century in the depth he managed for earlier epochs. Recent developments in eight to ten meter telescopes are barely mentioned. He provides a superficial discussion of radio telescopes, but doesn't mention solar telescopes. Space telescopes are briefly mentioned, but their history is barely scratched. The epilogue, looking back from year 2108, is more cute that informative.

Yes, read this book if you are interested in telescopes. But be prepared for a sense of unfulfilled promise, as this book could have been so much more ...

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent overview of the history of telescopes and those who used and made them, April 6, 2006

By 

Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope (Hardcover)

_Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope_ by Fred Watson is an epic, far-ranging history of one of the most important instruments in science. Watson traced the origin and development of the telescope from nearly four hundred years ago, when Dutch craftsmen Hans Lipperhey first brought to the world's attention the telescope in 1608 (the author demonstrated that though he gets credit for first bringing it to international attention, he is perhaps not the instrument's original inventor, as there were at least several near simultaneous separate inventions of it), all the way to the present with the impressive orbiting Hubble telescope.

The book is at times as much a history of astronomy as it is of the telescope, chronicling some of the lives of such luminaries as Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Herschel, and George Ellery Hale and many of the big discoveries, such as the discoveries of the cloud belts of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the planet Uranus, the moons of Mars, and the first spiral galaxy. Some of the most interesting accounts were of people and discoveries virtually unknown to the general public, such as that of William Gascoigne, a brilliant man who invented the telescopic sight by accident when he saw a spider drop between the objective and the eyepiece, leaving a thread behind it, leading him to develop two crossed threads that would enable an astronomer to point precisely at a star, and who also invented another device (also used in the focus of any eyepiece) that allowed for measuring the angular diameter of the Sun or Moon and the distances between close pairs of stars. Tragically, his life was cut short when he was killed in the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, part of the English Civil War (he was only 24).

The focus of the book however was on the origin and evolution of the telescope, the author detailing each new development in telescope technology, supplying the reader with diagrams to discern the inner workings of such advancements as the Keplerian or inverting telescope (one in which the field of view is independent of the diameter of the objective, replacing some of the problems with the Galilean telescope) and the Cassegrain telescope (one that used a convex secondary mirror to intercept the beam from the main paraboloid mirror before it formed an image, refocusing it back in such as way that an image was formed that could be magnified with an ordinary lens eyepiece behind the mirror). Of near equal importance was the evolution of telescope mounts, devices that held the telescope and allowed it to track the movement of celestial objects across the sky. Though there were some contemporary illustrations of various mounts, I wish there had been more diagrams for such arrangements as the equatorial mounting, English equatorial, and German equatorial to assist the lay reader.

Problems in telescope development were discussed, issues that bedeviled generations of astronomers and engineers, including chromatic aberration (when colored halos appear around images, a problem that mystified astronomers for many decades and was not corrected until two or more lenses were used in combination, lenses whose respective color errors would cancel each other out), comas (when stars take on the appearance of comets with short tails), and spherical aberration (a blurring of images resulting from objective lenses with curved surfaces, as the focused beams of light from a celestial object would fail to cross at a single point).

The history of famous and noteworthy individual telescopes was a very interesting feature of the book. Early telescope makers solved the problems of chromatic and spherical aberration by making the focal length of an objective very long in comparison with its diameter, reducing both aberrations to a level that would not be noticeable, resulting in long, spindly telescopes. Johannes Hevelius, a seventeenth century amateur in the city of Danzig, built a monstrous telescope whose focal length was 150 feet long, supported from a mast 90 feet high, its working more like the rigging of a sailing ship than an optical instrument, so ungainly that a fair number of men were needed to move and point it in the right direction and that any breeze would leave it quivering uncontrollably, making observation difficult. Another notable one is William Herschel's Forty-foot telescope, a massive for the time 48 inches in diameter, the telescope that he is best remembered for and one that still adorns the seal of the Royal Astronomical Society, an expensive object that would not have come to fruition without financial support from King George III (an early forerunner of national funding for scientific projects), and that when it came into use in 1789 proved something of a disappointment, thanks to high copper content of the mirrors (which tarnished rapidly and required frequent repolishing), difficult to manage without two additional workmen, and of course the famous British weather (though the telescope was maintained despite regular scientific usage to impress the King's guests as after all he did pay for it). Still another one was the Irish telescope named the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a massive telescope that was first used in 1845, its four tonne mirror taking sixteen weeks to cool once cast (and had to be cast five times owing to faulty cooling and accidents), an instrument that while it did produce some good science (discovering sixty "spiral nebulae" - they weren't know as galaxies yet), did not live up to its full potential, thanks to attentions being focused elsewhere due to the catastrophic potato famine of 1845-1848, and was dismantled in the early 20th century though between 1996 and 1998 it was lovingly restored to full working order with a new aluminum mirror and a modern hydraulic system to move it.

A good book, I thought some of the explanations could have been better. It had many contemporary illustrations, copious endnotes, an extensive bibliography, a glossary, a listing of famous telescopes today, and a global map showing their relative positions in the world today.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Stargazer"--the story of the telescope, February 10, 2008

By 

David Stern (Greenbelt, Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope (Paperback)

Books about science should be written by literate scientists--they are the ones to tell the real stories, not superficial versions padded with hyperbole, so often found in bookstores and libraries. Fred Watson knows telescopes, knows history--also knows the lives of the oddballs who created them, and the technical niceties. And being Australian, he has the gift of informal humor peculiar (perhaps) to a continent setttled be convicts.

Read the book, and if some of the technology is too detailed, just skim it and keep swimming. Watson starts with the giant telescopes of the present and the near future, and the relentless competition in building them. Then he backtracks to Hans Lipperhey, inventor of the telescope whose secret was foolishly leaked. He shows how Newton was not the originator of the mirror telescope, but built the first successful one, because he also invented the pitch-block method of grinding mirrors, still used by amateurs. Read about the Dollond monopoly, about the Herschels, Fraunhofer and many others, all the way to Bernard Schmidt who lost an arm playing withgunpowder as a kid and who in later life loved alcohol, yet designed an exquisitely different telescope, providing an extremely wide view.

It's all there, and much more. If you have a friend who's an amateur astronomer, this book makes a great gift. If you are one yourself, make sure to have your own copy, too.

David P. Stern, Greenbelt, Maryland