Customer Reviews

The Stargazer's Guide to the Universe: A Complete Visual Guide to Interpreting the Cosmos

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Although most serious astronomers don't look at images through their telescopes (they have instruments like spectroscopes analyzing the light that's coming in) the images that have been produced in the last few years have been truly outstanding. For the first time mankind has sent spacecraft to objects in our solar system. We have rocks back from the moon, we have close up images of planets and moons, we have Spirit and Opportunity roving around on Mars. And we have the Hubble Space Telescope sending back astounding photographs.

The result is this book, filled with images and information that just a short time ago simply wasn't available. The images that are reproduced here are simply spactactular. The book starts with the biggest objects: galaxies and star clusters. Then it moves down to our own Milky Way Galaxy, and then to our own solar system.

This is a coffee table picture book, but with some truly out of this world images.

The rather pompous title disguises a good beginner's guide to astronomy. The first two chapters provide a brief overview of our current understanding of astronomy, followed by a discussion of the instruments we now use to do astronomy, from Hubble to radio telescopes to space probes. After that comes the meat of the book, three chapters dividing the universe into our galaxy, outside our galaxy, and the solar system. Each chapter provides an overview followed by a host of examples. The examples are my favorite part of the book: each is a two-page spread, with a big beautiful photo on one side and an explanation on the other. The explanation consists not only of a brief text but a sky map showing the exact location of the object in the photo as well as a smaller, annotated version of the photo pointing out notable elements that appear in the image, whether it be craters or interstellar clouds of a particular composition or a ten-billion-year-old supernova. (I could have used some of that in my astronomy classes.)

The text is not terribly sophisticated, and I found myself skimming through it to get to the photo section. I also have one quibble and two errors. The quibble is that there's no mention of false-color imagery, even though I think a number of the photos are in false color - oxygen clouds are not automatically green. The errors are in the chapter on instruments. In one place it says the radio telescope at Arecibo is built into the top of a mountain. It's not, of course, it's built into the bottom of a (radio-dish-shaped) valley. It also states that the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, with its four 8.2 meter telescopes, has the light-gathering power of a mirror 200 meters across. Even with some additional smaller telescopes, that's unlikely: it would take another 590 8.2m telescopes to make that true. I assume he means the resolving power.

However, those are minor points in a beautiful and informative book. I got this at the library but would seriously consider getting my own copy, for both the beautiful photographs and the helpful explanations thereof.

Incredible photos of the universe from Hubble and other large telescopes. Makes you consider how insignificant we are in the scheme of things on the one hand and the size of our magnificent universe which we inhabit on the other. This book contains some of the most incredible astronomical photographs ever published anywhere in my opinion.