The Stargazing Year: A Backyard Astronomer's Journey Through the Seasons of the Night Sky [Hardcover]

Charles Laird Calia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 2005

In the winter of 2001, Charles Laird Calia lay down on the lawn in his front yard, looked up at the sky, and rediscovered a childhood passion. Part primer on the science and history of astronomy, part love poem to the night sky, The Stargazing Year is this amateur astronomer's memoir of a year spent gazing upward. In chapters spanning the twelve months of the night sky, the author invites readers to discover the mystery and beauty of stargazing.

Throughout the world, on any given night, thousands of people direct their telescopes to the heavens. Two centuries ago, an amateur observer was largely up against himself and his optics. Now, much of that has changed and, with the affordable equipment available today, amateur astronomers have made inroads in the study of variable stars, novas, and eclipsing binaries that have proven to be immensely valuable to scientists. Calia elegantly weaves the history of amateur astronomy and astronomers with his own personal story of how, one starlit evening when he was in his early forties, the galaxy opened its arms to him again. The Stargazing Year is a paean to the universe and its many mysteries.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For anyone who spent their childhood enraptured by the heavens, only to have that rapture interrupted by a career, family and social expectations, Calia's book provides new hope that their childhood joy can be rediscovered. In a series of 12 essays, each dedicated to one month of the year, Calia describes his quest to build his own backyard observatory, providing interesting tidbits of astronomical history and mythological lore along the way. The book is part memoir, part travelogue through the constellations visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Calia, a frequent contributor to Sky & Telescope magazine and the author of the novel The Unspeakable, weaves mythological tales of various constellations almost seamlessly together with momentous events in his own life, particularly the death of his astrologer mother. But his skill as a writer truly shines in the interconnectedness of his narrative, as when a lyrical passage on stellar nebulae segues into a dialogue with the salesman at the building supply store and then into a discussion of Robert Frost, another amateur astronomer. The result is charming, witty, wistful and ultimately inspiring. This is not a reference work, though the star charts at the beginning of each chapter and the directions for finding various objects in the night sky are sufficient for a casual observer with binoculars. Instead, this is a book to read for pleasure on those nights when the sky is overcast.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Lauding the pursuit of amateur astronomy, Calia extolls the night sky and links it to his home-improvement project: building a backyard observatory. Astronomy's do-it-yourself lineage is an honorable one, and Calia salutes backyard observers such as William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, as well as current serious amateurs who spot new objects in the heavens. Comparable to science writer Timothy Ferris' Seeing in the Dark (2002), Calia's personal account takes comedic advantage of his construction snafus, recounts his fencing with his astrology-believing mother, and transports the reader to the constellations. Teaching readers how to locate them as they rise and set over the seasons as viewed from his Connecticut home, Calia relates the Greek myths associated with the constellations and radiates excitement about the objects one can find in them. Amateurs, like professionals, often specialize, latching for inexplicable reasons onto comets, planets, variable stars, star clusters, or nebulae. Showing the avocation's possibilities and its historical and mythical connotations, Calia imparts an individualized experience of the cosmos. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; 1St Edition edition (May 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585423912
• ISBN-13: 978-1585423910
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,125,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Serendipity! Charles Calia has written a gem of a book!, July 10, 2005

By 

Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stargazing Year: A Backyard Astronomer's Journey Through the Seasons of the Night Sky (Hardcover)

In the opening sentence of his "Conclusion" to The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

In The Stargazing Year, Charles Laird Calia, while apparently having no significant quarrel with "the moral law within," writes of how his imagination was hooked at an early age in Pennsylvania and Minnesota by wonder, admiration, and awe at "the starry heavens above," and how he came full circle, after the passage of half a lifetime, to his fascination with the stars, his own return to the eternal return of the night sky.

Tracing the trajectories of the heavens, he simultaneously traces the trajectory of his own life: "Nostalgia is part and parcel of the human condition, a natural gift of aging, and it protects us from the message that the universe telegraphs to us with frightening accuracy. You are small and will soon be forgotten."

A frequent contributor to Sky & Telescope magazine, Calia is a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, and the British Astronomical Association. He now lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters, where he has built a backyard observatory.

Calia divides The Stargazing Year into 12 chapters, January through December, cataloguing the transit of the seasons from winter to autumn, and the changing constellations of the heavens.

Stumbling across Calia's work is a remarkable example of serendipity, a fortunate discovery, for The Stargazing Year is charmingly written, insightfully informative, and delightfully funny--a gem of a book.

Escaping from the planetary pull of his mother's obsession with astrology, Calia developed an obsession of his own, a passion for and love of astronomy. Under the watchful eye of his wife, who keeps a close watch over family expenditures, Calia's account of building his backyard observatory is hilarious, as he fumbles and flounders his way through the daunting construction, with help from the guy in the orange jacket at Home Depot.

The book is star-studded with arresting metaphors, similes, and analogies and an ingratiating self-deprecating humor. Think the staccato-voiced words of Rod Serling. Think the bucolic poetic lyricism of Robert Frost. Think the sly wit and wisdom of Mark Twain. Think the whimsy and zany inventiveness of Douglas Adams. Think the contagious enthusiasm and passion of Carl Sagan.

"Love can bring us a long distance," writes Calia, "if we take notice. I finally did. Throughout a celestial season, I had spent twelve months noticing, watching comets and asteroids, faint galaxies, sunspots, and distant stars. Creation unfolding. Some may witness the unfolding of the universe, like a gathering of planets, as comforting, a creation that cares enough to influence us, and they interpret it as such--a mystery with human fingerprints. Others scoff and find no connection where none was intended. Both sides miss the point, I think. And therein lies perhaps the greatest mystery: not how strange it is for the universe to unfold, but rather, that there is a universe to unfold at all."

Along the way, we learn a lot about astronomical history, such as Galileo and Tycho Brahe, and we are enthralled by Calia's playfully anthropomorphic description of the constellations as the mythological movements of predators and prey, monsters and mavericks, lovely maidens and rescuing heroes.

This paean to the cosmos is a joy to read. A word of caution, however, is in order: The Stargazing Year may send you scurrying to the nearest supply store to purchase a telescope. If so, I can envision Calia exulting, "My work here is done!"

Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville publishing house.

Note: An alternate translation(by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott) of the quotation by Kant is: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't *quite* hit the mark for me, covers a lot of angles, October 24, 2007

By 

R. J. McCabe (Seattle) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stargazing Year: A Backyard Astronomer's Journey Through the Seasons of the Night Sky (Hardcover)

Calia rediscovers his early love of stargazing, and takes us along for the ride.

Targeted more to the general public than astronomy buffs, it seemed to me this book tried to cover too many angles. Some topics are likely to be of more interest to the individual reader than others.

On one front, this is the story of his reawakened interest in astronomy, acquisition of a few telescopes, and his ambitious effort to build a backyard observatory. It's also monthly compendium of the constellations in the night sky and the legends surrounding them. Thrown in are a few highlights of what to observe in and around the constellations. Finally, there's the family interactions around this endeavor involving his wife and daughters.

All in all, I enjoyed the book.

5.0 out of 5 stars I really enjoyed this book, February 1, 2011

By 

Charles Hall (Raleigh, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stargazing Year (Paperback)

While it's true what another reviewer said, that the book is choppy and bounces around from topic to topic, I must say I really enjoyed reading it. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I really wanted to know the technical details of his telescope selection, to see a drawing of his split roof design, etc.; but it didn't seem to deter my enjoyment of the book. He has captured the spirit of amateur astronomers, and the feelings an adult has upon re-visiting a childhood hobby with the financial muscle of a grown-up.

I found the book highly entertaining. And amongst his many history of astronomy tidbits, I found quite a few that were new to me, despite having read a number of astronomy history books recently.