Customer Reviews

Through the Telescope: A Guide for the Amateur Astronomer, Revised Edition

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is the worst astronomy book I've encountered in forty years as an amateur astronomer! It is full of errors and has some of the poorest illustrations (out-of-focus, incorrectly labeled) I've ever seen in a commercial publication. Anyone interested in buying and using telescopes would be much better served by NightWatch by Terence Dickinson, The Backyard Astronomer's Guide by Dickinson and Dyer, or Phil Harrington's Star Ware.

It's amazing McGraw-Hill let this one out at all. There are typographical and syntactical errors on almost every page. I can't comment on technical accuracy, as I am a beginner at astronomy. But I do know when I've seen the same photograph twice with different, and inconsistent, captions. The publisher did a real disservice to the author of this edition--and to the memory of the author of the original version--by rushing this to market without at least showing it to a copy editor.

This is an excellent guide for the amateur astronomer, with copious information on both what to look at in the sky and what to buy to do so, including both binoculars and telescopes. It has copious information on every aspect of skywatching, down to the best filters to view the various planets through. It's very supportive of amateur astronomy, consistently pointing out the contributions that amateurs have made and continue to make to the science (one of the few sciences where this is still possible).

Quibbles: a few formatting problems, where the formatting notation shows up instead of italics or whatever was intended. And they repeat the urban legend about Galileo going blind from observing the sun (though admittedly I just recently found out that this is mistaken).

Other than that, it's an excellent book, though more of a reference than a "sit-down-and-read" book, which is what I did with it, at least for now.

Meanwhile, I wonder if some of the other reviews (below) apply to the earlier edition of the book, since I did not encounter the same problems.

I pity the novice who purchases this book with the intention of learning about amateur astronomy. The book is a demonstration of what happens when someone rushes it to publication, does not KNOW the subject and builds poorly on a work that wasn't very good in the first place. There are so many terrifically awful errors in this book, it would take another book to document them. Pictures of microscopes where telescopes should be, refractor telescopes described as Dobsonians, etc, etc. The illustration/pictures are also slipshod, out of focus and poorly rendered. I cannot believe a suposedly reputable publishing house could release this "joke" of a text on amateur astronomy. It should be withdrawn from the market NOW and burned. -Richard Anderson

As an amateur in astronomy, I found this book very educative. It covers all aspects of astronomy - from naked eye view of the sky to deep space objects, binocular to large telescope obesrvation, etc. Though it was written in 1989, the book will continue to be a reference book to all interested in astronomy.