Customer Reviews

Stargazing: Astronomy without a Telescope

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I enjoyed this book very much. I liked the fact that the author goes through each month of the year and does an excellent job of describing the constellations, and provides maps to help find the stars he mentions. He even covers both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. While I obviously live in the Northern Hemisphere, and so the Northern Hemisphere's sky maps are the most helpful in my own stargazing, I thought it was fun to read about how the sky in other parts of the world compares with my own backyard sky. He also gives helpful advice for finding each of the planets visible with the naked eye. He also describes comets, meteors, and other astronomical phenomona visible with the naked eye. I highly recommend this book for those who want to enjoy astronomy without necessarily spending a lot of money on equipment.

I own the first edition of this book, which is excellent. For the northern and southern hemispheres, Patrick Moore gives sky maps for the different seasons, so it is fairly easy to get to an appropriate place. What I like most, though, is that he shows useful outlines of constellations, instead of classic ones: What the book illustrates is much more likely to match what you see in the night sky of a city than what you would find in other sources. In addition, his instructions on finding specific stars are very easy to follow.

I'd strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to be more familiar with the stars they see at night, as well as anyone with a high interest in astronomy in general.

...learn the constellations. You will find this advice on many astronomy forums and I generally concur with it. I would just enhance it a little: knowing the costellations (and your way around the night sky) will help you enjoy your telescope.
This book will help you with the learning. The charts are not crowded (with the non-constellation stars) and easy to read; there is a separate chart or set of charts for each month and a corresponding description of what you can expect to see. Since I live in a light-polluted suburb I found that having a pair of binoculars helped me find all the stars in the constellations (and so did clear sky :-)