Customer Reviews

A Walk through the Southern Sky: A Guide to Stars and Constellations and their Legends

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

 

 

After deciding to go into the Observational Astronomy hobby, I have been denying experts' advise for months. Although being almost a rookie, "start with a pair of binoculars", "plan your session ahead" and so on seemed trivial to me. This book helps the reader to solve which is probably the very first lesson to begin with: "learn the sky". In addition to that, it is dedicated to the Southern Hemisphere, trascendental for those who live "below" the equator. "A walk through the Southern Sky" easily and friendly explains how to reach minor constellations starting at the major ones. From Orion and Canis Major, precise highways are traced to reach Canis Minor, Cancer, Lepus and so on. From Crux and Centauri, to Vela and so on. I had started with a friend's computerized scope, and always thought that "starhopping" would be imposible for me under light-polluted skies. Probably one of the major goals of the authors is having proved me wrong. Again, if I could, anybody can!

I take a trip to the Southern Hemisphere on occasion and have been looking for a good compact guide to bring along with me. I find the simplified star charts really useful to get myself quickly oriented. I don't need a full blown super detailed star atlas with all kinds of unnecessary detail and clutter that I'm unable to use, and this one fits the bill in that respect.

It also covers basic mythology of the Southern Skies and makes an excellent companion to it's sister work on the Northern Skies.

If your more interested in deep sky objects of the Southern skies you'd be better off looking elsewhere as this book only lightly discusses DSO's.

This is a great book for naked eye astronomy. You will be able to learn where the constellations are located in the night sky as well as many major stars. It is easy to follow and there is something very beautiful about sky lore. Humans have always looked at the stars for guidance. Learning naked eye astronomy is very good for you and gives you a sense of connection with the cosmos and Earth's relationship with it.

This book is a gift, so the person it's for could do a better review than me. However, several star boooks only mention the southern hemisphere and after much searching I found this one which emphasizes it.

Picked this up to help learn the constellations of the southern sky. For that purpose it certainly is a good read and a nice title. It wont point you to many deep sky objects or much from the various deep sapce objects catalogs however so if you are looking to purchase this for the purpose of finding DSOs then you should probably look elsewhere and go for some quality DSO style star charts instead.